Borrowed Tides
    Paul Levinson

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel 
are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.
BORROWED TIDES
Copyright  2001 by Paul Levinson
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions 
thereof, in any form.
This book is printed on acid-free paper. Edited by David G. Hartwell Design by 
Heidi Eriksen
A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010 ww.tor.com
Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Levinson, Paul.
Borrowed tides / Paul Levinson.-1st ed. . cm.
"A Tom Doherty Associates book." ISBN 0-312-84869-2 1. Interplanetary 
voyages-Fiction. I. Title.
PS3562.E92165 B67 2001
813'.54-dc21      00-048809
First Edition: March 2001   
Printed in the United States of America
0987654321


   To Tina, Simon, and Molly

Acknowledgements


    I first and foremost thank David G. Hartwell and his associate Jim Minz for 
their excellent editing of this book, and my agent, Christopher Lotts, of the 
Ralph Vicinanza Agency. I also thank Rick Nestler- whom I've never met-but who 
wrote a captivating folk song called "River That Flows Both Ways." The title was 
metaphoric inspiration for the start of this novel (the song is about the Hudson 
River), and indeed was too good to pass up as a title for the first section. I 
should also thank Betty Radens and the Fieldston Outdoors day camp, where my 
children, Simon and Molly, spent many wonderful summers, and at whose singalongs 
they and then I first heard Rick's song. And speaking of family, I thank my 
wife, Tina, and Simon and Molly, who make so many of the good things in my life 
not only possible but better. They are the inspiration for good things you may 
find in this novel about life in the stars....

    Contents
    1. The River That Flows Both Ways
    2. Omega Centauri
    3. Vanished Reunions
    Epilogue


    Part 1 


    The River That Flows Both Ways
     

   






One


    The white birches and slender oaks were the corner's last stand. They fell 
in the spring of 1964 to bulldozers and brusque men-a construction crew clearing 
the last of the lot on Bronx Park East for the high-rise that Aaron Schoenfeld 
would soon be inhabiting.
    Aaron surveyed the rubble with mixed emotions. His apartment would have a 
terrace that jutted way out over the park-"a view straight to the Hudson," his 
father had been telling everyone. There would be two bathrooms-no more waiting 
for his sister to stop staring at her face in the mirror. He liked all that. But 
he didn't like what happened to the trees.
    "The people who used to live here said there were moon spirits in those pale 
trees," a quiet voice said to Aaron. He turned to see a kid with burnt-brown 
eyes.
    "People?" Aaron didn't usually have conversations with kids this young. The 
kid looked to be about ten or eleven, three or so years younger than Aaron. The 
kid sounded much older.
    "Yeah, Indians," the kid said. "Years of Indian history are being wiped out 
here."
    "How do you know there were Indians right here? I don't see any teepees."
    Aaron was instantly sorry he'd said that. He could see the kid struggling 
with whether to walk away from him or share his secrets. And something about the 
kid's intensity made Aaron want to hear more.
    The kid reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a few pieces of 
chipped, flinty stone. "Arrowheads," he said, "made by the people whose main 
lands were in Pelham Bay. I found them right here."
    "How'd you know to look here?" Aaron asked. "I mean, even before this 
construction, it was just a-"
    "I could see the signs," the kid said. "I live right down the block." He 
pointed to a small semidetached house, with a big off-white hibiscus in front 
that looked like it had been watered by every mutt in the neighborhood. "This 
place was my backyard. I spend a lot of time here."
    "Did you tell anyone about the arrowheads?"
    "Who'm I gonna tell?" The kid gestured to the construction crew, just about 
packed up and ready to leave for the day. "I tried to talk to the foreman once, 
but he laughed in my face. Why should anyone pay any attention to what I say?"
    "Well, I am," Aaron said, surprising himself and extending his hand. "I'm 
Aaron Schoenfeld."
    The kid shook it with a tight grip. "Jack Lumet." He smiled for the first 
time. Aaron could tell this was a rarity.
    "The only reason you're even listening to me is that you're not . much older 
than I am," Jack said.
    "You're a smart kid," Aaron said.
    "It's not that I'm against tall buildings or stuff like that," Jack said. "I 
just wish they could build these things where they don't hurt what's already 
here."
    Aaron thought about the birches. He thought about a spring afternoon years 
earlier, when he was four or five, and saw a crew building part of the Bronx 
River Parkway. He'd cried when he saw them blast away a field of buttercups.
    "Don't worry-they'll plant new ones," his father had said.
    But new ones-deliberately planted ones-weren't the same. They lacked 
something of wildflowers.
    Aaron understood that day what Jack Lumet was saying.
    But he also knew that he was very much looking forward to seeing the Hudson 
from his terrace, looking forward to the clearer view of the stars that he 
imagined his new outpost would provide. And if his high-rise weren't built here, 
where else? Everywhere you looked, there was something that people wanted to 
keep, didn't want to build over.
    In the spring of 1964, wildflowers were still in long supply in the Bronx.


    Aaron ran into Jack maybe once or twice a year after that-usually on that 
corner of Bronx Park Towers where he lived. He never knew what to say on those 
occasions. Usually hi, how're you doing, OK, you? all right, I guess, and the 
wind's howling down the block and they're shivering and they'd better both be on 
their ways. But Aaron always knew that Jack had some sort of drama percolating 
in his head, some take on the universe that Aaron would have wanted to hear if 
only he could have figured out some common ground, some pretext for the two of 
them to talk. But he also knew he had too many other important things to do, too 
many life-and-death crises-impress that girl, finish this report, impress that 
girl, deal with his parents, impress that girl, respond to that insult, impress 
that girl-erupting on an almost daily basis as he was growing up in those years.
    Aaron went on to City College. He started as a bio major, until the smell of 
fetal pigs at eight in the morning gagged him out of biology. Then on to 
psychology, and what made people, not pigs, tick. But Freud didn't satisfy, so 
Aaron drifted into sociology, where he hoped he could write some papers on the 
Beatles. He finally wound up with a Ph.D. in philosophy of science and an 
uncanny capacity to dazzle the crowd with quotes from Kant, Nietzsche, and 
Russell. An easy path to a safe professorship. But Aaron thought that maybe he'd 
picked up some important insights along the way.
    Jack had turned up at City College too, though his emergence as a scholar 
followed no such meandering course. To everyone he met, Jack talked the same 
thing: Indians. He studied Indians in the anthropology department. He gave 
lectures on Indians to New York City schoolkids. He showed up naked at a 
departmental party one night, dressed like the people who originally lived 
there, he'd said. Aaron heard about this from a girl he'd talked into having 
dinner with him. He burst out laughing and said good for Jack; the girl said 
they both were perverts; that was the last he saw of her.
    Jack came out with a small book a few years later-Native American Legends in 
New York City. Aaron saw a one-paragraph review f it in The New York Times. He'd 
intended to buy it. But he never saw it in the bookstores.
    And that was the last Aaron heard of Jack for a long time. He was nowhere to 
be seen in the new millennium. Neither on-line nor at any of the scholarly 
conferences Aaron regularly attended.
    Jack was certainly close to the last person on Earth Aaron ever expected to 
see at any of the desperate meetings he'd been chairing in the space station off 
Mars.


    Aaron was an unlikely director for a less likely project. His article 
"Philosopher Speaks on Behalf of Space Exploration" had made a big impact in 
Spired-more than two million e-mails raged in reply and debate within 
twenty-four hours of its publication. The president of the United States had 
seen it. The president had a taste for philosophy. The president personally 
phoned Aaron and asked if he'd like to serve on a task force in preparation for 
a possible mission to Alpha Centauri.
    Aaron didn't have to be asked twice.
    But five years later, Aaron and his people were worried. The Connelly 
administration was on the verge of shelving the project. Two prior chairs of the 
task force had already quit. Now Aaron was in the hot seat.
    "Joe's absolutely firm on this," Naomi Senzer, the president's liaison, told 
the assembled team. "He says he's stuck out his head far enough already."
    Alexei Primakov grunted. "He sure ain't JFK."
    "He's better," Aaron replied, though he shared every bit of the Russian's 
frustration. "JFK had the Soviets-your grandparents-to compete against. JFC has 
a peachy, cooperative world, on the surface. Everyone claims to be happy with 
it. Hard to wring support out of Congress in that kind of environment." The 
demons of the twenty-first century, Aaron knew, were inner, panhuman, far more 
difficult to oppose with science and funding than had been Communism.
    "Indeed," Naomi said. "So if we do this at all, we'll have to make do with 
just what we have."
    "Which gives us a one-way trip to Alpha," David Percival, Aaron's chief 
assistant, said. "Which means we do it either nonpersonned, or as a ticket to 
oblivion."
    Aaron shuffled through his papers and his options that night. Neither 
contained anything new.
    Most people knew that Alpha Centauri was the closest star system to Earth's 
own. Fewer knew that its distance from Sol was about 4.3 light-years. Even fewer 
knew that it was actually a triple star-and that Alpha Centauri A was a G2 V 
star, just like the sun.
    Next to no one knew of the coincidence that had come about in 2016.
    Alpha Centauri C-the faint M5 star aptly named Proxima because it for some 
time had been the closest of the three to Earth- suddenly seemed to switch 
positions with Centauri A and B, bringing the Sol-type star closer to Earth than 
before. And lo and behold, when the Hubble II stared at this star in its new 
position, it saw what could have been an Earthlike planet or two circling around 
it. This was a surprise-Tau Ceti had previously been deemed the closest star 
likely to have worlds, and the evidence for its planets was still very 
inconclusive. But seeing via the Hubble was believing, even if what was seen was 
little more than a trace on a screen, a smudge of suggestion.
    Meanwhile, almost to the day that the Hubble began looking at Alpha Centauri 
A in a new light, Lawrence Livermore/Microsoft Labs announced to the president's 
secret committee that they had developed a hybrid chemical/fusion drive that 
could move a spaceship faster than any heretofore known, at a cumulative 
velocity of .48 speed of light in deep space.
    The upshot: Alpha Centauri A, a star with as good a chance as any at cooking 
up Earth-type life, was suddenly just a little more than eight years' travel 
away from humanity. A pittance in time, for species and solar systems.
    The catch: The LL/M drive required enormous amounts of fuel to achieve its 
initial speed, make the trip to Centauri with any necessary adjustments along 
the way, and decelerate once there. It presumably would need at least an equal 
amount of fuel to make the trip back home. Not only was that amount of fuel 
beyond any budget that Congress or even a global consortium was likely to 
approve, it was also quite beyond the capacity of any conceivable holding tanks 
to hold- especially traveling at half-light speed.
    The result: By the year 2021, it was becoming clear to even the most 
starry-eyed enthusiasts that humankind had perhaps been dealt a maddeningly 
frustrating hand in the matter of Alpha Centauri. Humanity apparently now had 
the capacity to travel to this nearly unblinking star.
    Period.
    One way.
    Aaron finally put down his papers and rubbed his eyes and thought what he 
always did before drifting off to sleep these days: He had no intention of 
letting this get in his way.


    "Tea brewed at .78g is a true delight," Aaron said, and passed a cup to 
Naomi the next morning. Devotees of the beverage on Mars Vestibule space station 
had been quick to discover this. "Water under pressure permeates the tea leaves 
more thoroughly at our lower gravity," Aaron added.
    "Ah, yes, pressure as friend, pressure as foe," Naomi said. "A double-edged 
sword." She held up the glass cup of tea to the sunlight that poured through the 
real-view window in Aaron's office, as if she were measuring the refraction of 
its rays. "What's the point of pressuring the president when we already know 
that even if we had the money, we couldn't do the trip?" she asked, her tone 
suddenly changing from philosophic to prosecutorial. She placed the tea on the 
table without drinking, and looked straight at Aaron.
    "It gives our group something to focus on," he answered. "And we need the 
time to come up with a solution to the fuel problem."
    "You have any ideas?"
    "Plenty," Aaron said. "But what we need are solutions. Here." He pushed a 
printout of a paper across the table to her. "What do you think of this?"
    Naomi leafed through the paper, eyebrows arched. "This guy's a specialist on 
Native Americans," she said. "Why the hell should we pay any attention to his 
theory about the stars?"
    "Because his theory addresses the nub of our problem," Aaron replied.
    "So the Iroquois had a notion that the currents between our sun nd the star 
cluster we call Alpha Centauri-whatever they may have meant by 'currents'-were 
the same as the currents in the Hudson River, the river they said flowed both 
ways. You really want me to tell this to the president?"
    "A search of more than two hundred years of logged publications on Combinets 
came up with nothing better," Aaron said. "In fact, it came up with nothing that 
really could be useful to our problem at all, other than the possibilities 
presented in this paper."
    "It's likely nonsense," Naomi said. "What good is that?"
    "What if it's not?"
    Naomi shrugged. "The paper's more than fifteen years old. Is this guy still 
around? Can we talk to him?"
    Aaron smiled. "He's due here in about an hour."


    Mars Vestibule shimmered like a spider's web in a moonlit field. A hundred 
little compartments hummed with information and life-the fragile cutting edge of 
enduring human penetration of the cosmos, a result of the brief powerful 
fluorescence of space urge in the twenty-first century. Its inhabitants yearned 
with an inspiration surpassing that of any insect population to expand this 
human web ever farther. But the task was enormous. Webs don't fly. Even when 
humanly spun in synchronous orbit around Mars.
    Jack Lumet walked with a scowl on his face into one of the glittering rooms. 
He moved as if he were tiptoeing on oil-slicked ice back in the Bronx-a common 
reaction of those who were new to low g.
    "You look good, Jack." Aaron stood up and shook his hand. "In fact, you look 
great for, what are you now, sixty-eight?" Jack also looked as intense as ever, 
only now the face was topped with singed gray rather than ink black, more than 
six decades in the smoldering.
    Jack nodded. "A long way from Bronx Park East to Mars Vest, isn't it?"
    "What were the odds that the two of us would have made it," Aaron said and 
motioned Jack to a seat. "This is Naomi Senzer"-the Iwo exchanged hellos-"and 
you already know why we're here. Basically, we'd like you to tell us about your 
Hudson River theory."
    "It's not a theory as far as the Hudson River is concerned," Jack aid. "It's 
a fact that the Atlantic Ocean current is so strong that it flows well past 
Tarrytown. And of course the Hudson River, like all rivers, flows back to the 
ocean. So it's a river that flows both ways. And the people who originally lived 
along its shores noticed this."
    "Right," Naomi said. "But what can you tell us about the Iroquois theories 
of star currents? I assume those were indeed theories, not facts."
    Jack ignored the sarcasm. He had spent a lifetime preaching the wisdom of 
Indians to skeptical audiences. Likely it was the only time he was really happy, 
Aaron thought.
    "You know, Native Americans had notions of the stars that were not all that 
different from the star stories of other peoples," Jack said. "The Algonquins, 
who lived near the river with the Iroquois, saw a bear chased by hunters in the 
same place the Greeks saw the Great Bear and we see the Big Dipper. And the 
Greek explanation of the Centaur-which contains your Alpha Centauri star-has 
lots of resemblances both to subcontinent Indian myths and to the stories of the 
Iroquois. Though, as I pointed out in my paper, the Iroquois stories go a bit 
further."
    "When in their history did the Iroquois come up with their cosmology about 
Alpha Centauri?" Naomi asked.
    "Legend is pretty specific about that-an oddity, since Native American 
mythology was obviously oral, and so not easily traceable. But according to my 
research, an Iroquois sachem by the name of Wise Oak first said that the 
currents flow both ways not only in the Big River-the Hudson-but in the Big 
River to the star cluster that we call Alpha Centauri. That would be about 
fifteen hundred A.D."
    "And how exactly did Wise Oak come to know this?" Naomi pressed.
    Jack looked at her-his frown replaced now by a full smile, an event Aaron 
still had the feeling was as infrequent in appearance as Halley's comet. "He 
claimed to have traveled there," Jack replied.
    "Ah. I see. Pity you didn't mention that in your ridiculous paper, Dr. 
Lumet. Would have saved all of us a bit of time." Naomi tossed her copy of the 
paper in Jack's direction and stalked out of the room. It made a graceful, 
air-glider arc in the low g, and landed on Jack's lap with a pirouette.


    "So here's my problem," Aaron said to Naomi after catching up with her-after 
he had directed Jack to some constellations visible from the far side of the 
station. "I've known this man since we were kids. He's a fanatic-pretty much 
humorless about everything except his beloved Indians, but that he would lie in 
any way about them is inconceivable, precisely because of his obsession."
    "Demented people often think they're telling the truth when they lie," she 
said. "That's part of their illness."
    "True," Aaron said. "But given our situation, doesn't it make sense to see 
what's right with his game rather than what's wrong with it?"
    "Weren't you the one who wrote that Wittgenstein was one of the worst 
philosophers of the twentieth century? Now you're paraphrasing him?"
    "Point well taken." Aaron bowed. That politicians actually read his 
philosophy still floored him.
    Naomi relented a little. "OK, putting your friend's overactive imagination 
in the best possible light: Suppose his sachem, Wise Oak, had a vision about 
traveling to Alpha Centauri and back. Visions are the source of most Indian 
knowledge, right?"
    "Presumably," Aaron said.
    "OK. So where do we go from that?" she asked.
    "Well, first, we recognize its possible relevance to our difficulties. After 
all, Wise Oak had this vision-if that's what it was-about the very star we want 
to travel to."
    "Not as significant as you're saying," Naomi said. "After all, the Centauri 
cluster is third brightest in Earth's skies-not surprising that the Iroquois 
would spin legends about it."
    "True again about its brightness," Aaron said. "But it's not visible in 
northeastern skies-the regular Iroquois haunts. So the fact that their wise man 
had a vision about it may be significant after all."
    "Why? Maybe the Iroquois just heard about it from some Seminoles in Florida. 
Maybe they were talking about another star entirely. That's my point-this whole 
Indian thing is just mystical nonsense."
    "Jack's not some irrational mystic. His paper offers a legitimate scientific 
principle to back this up."
    "The boomerang effect?" Naomi scoffed. "Come on. That worked for Apollo 13 
around the moon. It worked around Venus. I'd be willing to risk, maybe, a trip 
to Saturn with one-way fuel, on the hope that he ship would swing around and get 
a free ride back to Earth. But all the way to Alpha Centauri? Traveling at .48 
speed of light? That's crazy."
    "All right," Aaron said. "Let's play it your way-it's crazy. What then? We 
just forget about this project? And you tell the president, what-he pissed away 
billions of the taxpayers' hard-earned money on this? You're comfortable with 
that?"
    She shifted in her seat. "I gave up being comfortable the day I got involved 
in this goddamned project." She glared at Aaron. "Too much time in low g must've 
deformed my brain. Otherwise I would have put a stop to this a long time ago."
    Aaron stared back at her. "I'm saying there's no need to do that. Look, all 
we need here is a decent cover story and everyone's ass is saved. The earliest 
our LL/M ship can return from Alpha Centauri, if we can make the round-trip with 
one-way fuel, is sixteen years. By that time JFC will be long out of office, and 
God knows, with your smarts, you'll likely be president yourself. And if for 
some reason the ship doesn't return-if Jack's or whoever's theory we use turns 
out to be wrong-well, you'll be too well situated then to be really hurt by 
that. The public's memory spans maybe a year or two at most in these kinds of 
things. Certainly not a decade."
    Naomi exhaled slowly. "Tell me more about this boomerang theory. I'm not 
going to go to the president with just some goddamn Indian fantasy in my hand."
    "Well, as Jack explains in his paper," Aaron replied, "the configuration of 
the projectile and the environment allows the initiating power to in effect 
contain within it the power for the return trip-no additional fuel is needed. 
This is obviously well known in smaller arenas. It brought Apollo 13 back from 
the moon, like you said. The first Galileo probes to Jupiter also spun around 
the sun to get there-a variant of the boomerang. And it worked around Venus in 
2009. But, yes, it's totally untested at the interstellar distances and speeds 
we're talking about here-though Freeman Dyson and others were theorizing about 
it as long ago as the early 1960s. Unfortunately, the money it would cost to 
test it with an uncrewed ship big enough to hold people is the same money it 
would cost to send a ship with people there-the big cost is the fuel, which 
would be the same. So there's no payoff in testing."
    "Other than no one gets killed in a nonpersonned test," Naomi said. "No 
cheaper, but at least we get to sleep at night."
    "Nonpersonned won't do it," Aaron said. "You yourself said robots are like 
masturbation-remember your SmithSONYan speech?-when it comes to space 
exploration. They can miss the really important things. They don't cry when they 
see the Earth trembling in the void. And reports from automated systems don't 
have much effect on the public anyway-they'd just as soon see a movie 
altogether. They want real people bringing home eyewitness accounts for the 
bucks they're paying." And there were reasons more profound for humans to be on 
this first outing to another star and its possible planets-reasons of the soul, 
philosophic and scientific, reasons having to do with humanity's place and 
purpose in the universe-but Aaron knew that these were of less concern to the 
president's special assistant.
    "So your plan is that we chance sending a shipful of people out to the star 
on a suicide trip, that it?" she asked derisively. "And I'm supposed to let that 
happen because it'll help my career any way it pans out?"
    "I wouldn't put it quite so starkly," Aaron said. "My guess is we'd have no 
difficulty fielding the volunteers we'd need for such a mission. And there's a 
big difference between risk and suicide."
    "Yeah? Maybe, if the risk is informed," Naomi said. "We'd field volunteers 
on the basis of what? The Iroquois' Hudson River in deep space? Or the 
Aborigine-cum-Apollo boomerang?"
    "Whatever does the job," Aaron said. "At the distances and speeds we're 
dealing with, I can't say for sure that one is better than the other."
    "My point exactly," Naomi said.
    Aaron said nothing.
    Naomi shook her head in disgust. "Well, at least the boomerang has some 
scientific plausibility."
    "Yes."
    "How will the starship have any time to even see anything near Alpha 
Centauri, whipping around it at half speed of light?"
    "That's the beauty of the boomerang," Aaron replied. "According to Ulam and 
Dyson and others who worked out hypothetical equations for gravity-assisted 
propulsion-that's what they called the boomerang back then-the star imparts 
enormous velocity to the starship as it makes the turn. So the ship decelerates 
on approach, has time to look round, and then whips back out to Sol at half 
speed of light with no additional fuel."
    "The trajectory would have to be just right," Naomi considered. "Incredible 
precision at incredible speeds and distance."
    "True," Aaron allowed.
    "Too many incredibles for my liking."
    "As you said, we don't have the luxury now of looking for a solution we like 
or feel comfortable with," Aaron replied. "We're down to going with anything 
that has a chance of working."
    "You know, I think the only reason you even trotted out that Indian thing 
was to make the boomerang look possible in comparison," Naomi said.
    Aaron smiled. "Jack's paper made the connection."
    "You're one damned piece of work for a professor," Naomi said. She stood up. 
"You'll have my decision next month. But I'll tell you this: The most I'll agree 
to-the most-is a ship filled with shit-can robots. I may be a political 
cutthroat. But I'm no murderer."


    The launch was ready two years later. The LL/M drive had performed just as 
expected in two round-trip probes, one without people, the other with, to the 
Oort Cloud beyond Pluto-a startling, sparkling place that was farther than any 
human had ever been before by a long shot. The data from those two trips alone 
would change some basic conceptions about Earth's place in the solar system.
    Unfortunately, the Oort didn't have enough of its own concentrated pull to 
test the boomerang. But an LL/M jaunt to Neptune had returned via boomerang, 
providing a confirmation that the whip-around worked at least on very short 
half-speed-of-light voyages.
    Aaron had prevailed upon Naomi to build the starship-recently christened the 
Light Through-as if it would be carrying a crew of nine humans. A central 
purpose of the expedition, after all, was to determine not only if a ship with 
the LL/M drive could travel to and from Alpha Centauri, but if it could make the 
trip with people. The only real difference in design for the people-ship was a 
self-contained biosphere system that could generate oxygen and food and 
medication, and process waste back into production. Such biospheres had already 
been in extensive use in various outposts from Mars to Jupiter for nearly a 
decade, and posed no great expense.
    But the crew was all robotic.
    With one last-minute exception.
    "He's going to his death if he's wrong," Naomi said as she looked over the 
final preparations with Aaron. "And we have no real proof that he's right."
    "Columbus had no real proof either-just theories," Aaron replied. "Proof 
isn't all it's cracked up to be."
    Naomi rolled her eyes in exasperation. "The only reason I'm allowing Jack to 
go is he has no close family to contest his signing of the forms," she said. 
"The last thing I and whatever administration is in office eight or even sixteen 
years from now need is a wrongful-risk suit."
    That, and you don't mind the possibility of sacrificing Jack to test out the 
biosystem that you weren't too thrilled about putting in the ship just for 
robots, even despite its minimal cost, Aaron thought.


    "I could think of a worse place to have a yam sandwich." Jack smacked his 
lips and looked at the Light Through, suspended in docking just off Mars 
Vestibule outside the real-view window.
    "You mean looking at the ship like this, or inside that ship?" Aaron asked.
    "I guess both," Jack said, almost with a smile.
    The prospect of flying in a starship to Alpha Centauri was making Jack a 
happier man-even if that prospect was uncertain in its ultimate outcome, to say 
the least. But Aaron understood.
    The ship itself looked like an opal or a pearl, a basic form that had been 
pleasing to humanity for at least as far back as people had been making records 
of what pleased them. Plato had imagined his world of ideal forms, from which 
all imperfect human concepts of beauty emerged, to be inhabited with the likes 
of this. His pupil Aristotle, more enamored of the physical here and now, had 
claimed such spherical perfection for the planets themselves.
    The Light Through had no front or back-no bow or stern. The physics of the 
LL/M drive required thrust from a myriad of sides in carefully computed multiple 
sequence to achieve speed at half-C. Form followed function, and the result was 
a sight to behold.
    That was the outside.
    The inside? Well, who gave a damn what robots thought of it.
    That's why, in addition to many other reasons, Aaron was glad that Jack 
would be aboard. For the inside was beautiful too. And Jack, more than any other 
person Aaron had known, was a keen appreciator of such beauty.
    "So, have you made your decision yet?" Jack asked.
    "Oh, I guess I made it a long time ago," Aaron replied.
    Now Jack did smile.
    "We're going to the end of the line." Aaron extended his hand. "Just like we 
used to say about that spur of the old New York Central that ran up to Chatham."
    Jack took Aaron's hand, shook it. "The end of the line," he said. "Like that 
Bob Dylan song."
    "Travelling Wilburys," Aaron said.
    "Were they a real group?" Jack asked.
    "About as real as the two of us as astronauts."


    "No!" Naomi cried out. "Even I won't allow that! We've been friends for too 
long." She put her hand on Aaron's arm.
    "I appreciate the sentiment," Aaron said, "believe me, I do. But my wife has 
been gone five years now, our kids are all well established-they haven't given 
me any grandchildren; misguided population control!-and I've already served my 
purpose here. No one's going to let me lead another space task force until the 
world sees that this one pays off."
    "OK, I'll have to be blunt with you then, Aaron. You're too old to go on 
this trip. Jack is too, but he's not my friend. Look at you: You were 
seventy-three last month. The round-trip-if it works at all- will be at least 
sixteen years for you. Latest theories agree that no significant relativity 
effects should set in at half speed of light, as you know. So you'll be aging 
normally on the trip-seventy-three years plus sixteen. Doesn't add up at your 
age."
    "No? Your math is a bit out of date. We're in the age of miracles and 
wonders, remember? Average life span was up to ninety-seven for hose in their 
seventies, last time I checked, assuming you don't have IMMies. Besides, I 
tested positive for the Russell-Shaw factor; so did Jack."
    Naomi shook her head. "Russell-Shaw hasn't been completely proven yet. 
There's no definitive evidence that-"
    "We back to absolute proof again? Let's shoot for something more reasonable. 
How about, Bertrand Russell and George Bernard Shaw both lived into their late 
nineties, fully functional mentally, in a world with none of the gene therapy 
that Jack and I have been undergoing for the past two years?" Aaron 
involuntarily shivered with the recollection-life-extending gene therapy wasn't 
the most pleasant experience in the world, or off it. "It's a fact," he said 
more softly, "that there's a genetic factor correlated with longevity and mental 
agility to age one hundred, and that people who have this factor also seem to 
pursue the philosophic life in one way or another. Thomas Jefferson and John 
Adams also likely had it, though in their day the best they could do without 
medication was make it to their eighties, early nineties."
    Naomi's eyes narrowed. "So you've been planning this the whole time?"
    "Right. All my life, in a way."
    "But that's no reason to squander what's left of it on this," Naomi said.
    "Feelings of uselessness can be far more deadly than most diseases," Aaron 
replied. "And that is a medically documented fact."
    "So what do you expect me to do?" Naomi asked. "You and I know just what 
feet of clay this leap to the stars has. That's why I- the president-okayed the 
trip for robots, not people. I made the exception for Jack-"
    "Right, because he's no big deal, just some nut with a fixation on Indians. 
But I'm different, right? I suppose I should be flattered."
    She smiled. "You are different, Aaron. You want me just to say good-bye to 
you next month-say, have a good trip, see you in sixteen years, when I think 
there's a fair chance I'll never see you again?"
    But Aaron could see she was not completely immune to the appeal of such a 
possibility; otherwise, the discussion would have been over already. Her first 
instinct had been to say no to his going. She said she was motivated by 
friendship, but she needed to protect her own reputation, her own conscience, 
from a charge that she had sent not one but two old men to die of old age or 
worse on this mission. But if Aaron was right about this supremely political 
woman, she was now entertaining the thought that if the mission as a whole 
didn't make it, never returned, then Aaron lost somewhere in space would leave 
one less person behind who could bear witness to her complicity in the deadend 
star run. Of course, other members of his task force who wouldn't be on the ship 
had a pretty good idea of what was going on-he'd included Percival in particular 
on every facet of his thinking-but Aaron knew that his own absence would be a 
great boon to Naomi in dealing with any recriminations that might follow the 
Light Through's failure to return, certainly in responding to any congressional 
witchhunt that might ensue. Despite what he'd said about the public's highly 
perishable attention span, congressional committees had a way of raking up old 
coals and blowing them into nasty new flames. Aaron as a witness would likely 
provide more fuel, however he testified.
    "Let's say you take ill on the ship," Naomi said. "Neither you or Jack is an 
M.D."
    "That's what medisim is for, isn't it? Hell, AI-MD modules are hardwired 
into the computer systems of every simple planet-going vessel-the Light Through 
has them packed into the system with quadruple redundancy. They should have us 
covered for any illnesses known to our species. And for those that aren't..." 
Aaron shrugged. "Well, I doubt that a flesh-and-blood human doctor would be of 
much help to us then anyway."
    Naomi made a sarcastic sound. "You don't believe that, Aaron- you're a 
master of arguing whatever side of an issue suits your needs, aren't you? We 
both know humans are far and away the best hedge- the only hedge-against the 
truly unknown." She looked away for a few long seconds, then sighed. "I'll let 
you know next week. But if I do agree that you can go, you'll need not only a 
human doctor on board, but some kind of a proper, minimal crew." She shook her 
head in self-reproach. "What a mess."
    Aaron nodded.
    Politicians acting in their own best interests were a feature of the 
universe far better proven than boomerangs.


    But the next week passed. And so did eleven others. And there still was no 
decision from Naomi.
    Aaron began to suspect the worst: The entire mission might be canceled....
    He got the call from Naomi three weeks later. "I'll see you in your office 
on Mars Vest tomorrow," she said.
    She showed up with a lilliputer in her hand. "Listen to this," she said.
    Aaron listened. "It's all hash and ping to me," he said. "Same background 
radiation we always get from Alpha Centauri."
    Naomi nodded. "I'm with you. But the SETI people think it's something 
different."
    "A message?"
    "No," Naomi replied. "Just something different from the usual hash." Her 
face looked pained. "I'm still not sure. It's likely just some random change. 
But it happened at the right time-it tipped the scales with the president. He'd 
like flesh and blood to check this out, if we can field a small crew."
    Aaron didn't even try to suppress his smile.


    The crowd that saw them off in the corridor was small. Even a big crowd 
would have been minuscule compared to the billions viewing the event on their 
screens.
    Percival and Primakov were on hand, keeping their distance from Naomi, 
glaring their quiet, unforgiving fury at her for not being included on the 
mission. You're needed back here, Naomi had insisted. Aaron hugged each of the 
bon voyage party in turn, Naomi last.
    Jack hugged no one. He just looked off into the distance, eyes focused 
nowhere, everywhere, as if he were viewing some story that no one else could 
see.
    "You look like you've just seen a ghost, Jack." Aaron clapped him on the 
back as they started walking down the corridor, toward the portal of the 
starship. "So how does it feel to be among the first humans to travel to another 
star?"
    Jack disengaged his contemplation of the infinite to take in the immediate. 
"Who says we're the first?"


    The rest of the crew-seven others-were already on the ship, which was soon 
under way.
    Sarah Chichester was thirty-seven. She had high cheekbones and brilliant 
white hair. She was also brilliant in all matters virtual, telematic, and 
computional. In fact, Aaron had known she was exceptional since he'd first 
spotted her at a philosophy and cyberspace conference nearly fifteen years 
earlier. And she'd just proven it again.
    "It was actually pretty easy," Sarah said. "I call it my enhancement 
algorithm." She looked out the real-view window at the Oort Cloud, floating 
straight ahead. "I think of my algorithm as a computer enzyme, because it helps 
the analysis program digest the data, and points the conclusion in a certain 
direction."
    "So there was something unusual in the readings from Alpha Centauri to begin 
with, and your... virtual enzyme just made it more apparent." Aaron hadn't 
allowed himself the luxury of discussing this at any length with Sarah prior to 
now, when the Light Through was beyond recall range for anything except a major 
technological failure or a life-threatening condition for the crew. He had 
needed something to get Naomi off the dime, so he'd sent out desperate feelers 
to several well-placed contacts, and he'd hit pay dirt with Sarah and the SETI 
people.
    "Oh, yes," Sarah replied. "We get anomalies in readings from lots of stars, 
especially with the new listening equipment in the past decade. But there was 
something a little different about Alpha Centauri this time-that whole area's 
been in flux since ACA-ACB and Proxima made the shift. But the latest reading 
was different, and my enzyme made the most of it."
    "You told Naomi that it felt like an invitation," Aaron said appreciatively.
    "Well, it could be." Sarah's turquoise eyes crinkled and twinkled. 
"Invitations don't have to always come in fancy letters and envelopes."
    Aaron looked at those eyes, then at the Oort.
    He hoped the other six volunteers on the ship were in Sarah's league.
    They would have their human M.D. after all, as well as a botanist to 
cultivate their gardens for food, and folks in the other essential positions for 
a starship carrying nine to Alpha Centauri-a starship composed of undoubtedly 
its most important elements. Human beings.
    All had been briefed on the dangers nearly a year earlier, and had elected, 
for whatever reasons, to take the risk.
    Their dossiers were impressive. They seemed to have all the requisite 
talent, and more.
    Aaron sighed, and contemplated just how far absurd chance and unyielding 
passion had gotten them-and about the enormous role such factors played in great 
human ventures.
    The only thing that really concerned Aaron about his new colleagues was 
that, on the personal level, he barely knew most of them. How could he? 
Training, however intensive, was not the real thing. Coming to work, even seven 
days a week, could not be the same as living together for sixteen years.
    And he wondered, as the Oort and its desolate beauty filled the screen with 
a light so different from any he had ever known, how well he knew himself out 
here.
    It didn't matter, as long as he was going.
    Sarah took ill a little after a year into the voyage.
    Kathy Lotari, their young M.D. in residence with a Biosphere V credential, 
had no idea what was causing it. "She hadn't been sick a day in her adult life 
back home-at least according to the records. And now she gets fevers and sweats 
every other month." Kathy shook her head. "At least it doesn't seem too serious. 
Maybe deep space just doesn't agree with her."
    "I'm beginning to wonder how well it agrees with any of us," Aaron said.
    Kathy's eyebrow arched. "Is anyone else feeling sick? How about you? Are you 
OK?"
    "Oh, I'm fine," Aaron replied. "I didn't mean the universe doesn't agree 
with us physically, though maybe that's part of it. I meant... I don't know, 
some of the crew seem to be on edge lately. Sometimes a lot of the crew. It's 
hard to pin down-it comes and goes."
    "It's natural," Kathy said.
    "To feel uncomfortable out here? I guess so. But sometimes I get the feeling 
that deep space is allergic to us, or maybe we're allergic to it."
    "It's the first time we've ever been out here," Kathy said. "It makes sense 
that we'd feel ill at ease-we have no bearings, no standards to judge what's 
normal, no backlog of experience to gauge what we do."
    "No sure way to get back home," Aaron added.
    Kathy nodded. "That too. It's all new."
    










Two
    

    Aaron considered. "You think Sarah's problem is psychological? She seems so 
in control of herself."
    "No, I don't think so," Kathy replied. "I don't think her ailment is 
psychosomatic. I can't say what it is, though. Just that, somehow, life out here 
doesn't seem to be working as it should for her."
    Aaron sighed. "Well, we'll need to keep an eye on her, then. And the rest of 
the crew, too."


    Sarah seemed to stabilize in the months ahead, though she continued to 
suffer periodic bouts of a variety of ailments-coughing, sneezing, dizziness-all 
without apparent cause, none life-threatening. Kathy took careful notes and kept 
them in a file called "Deep Space Syndrome."
    The rest of the crew got worse.
    As the voyage progressed, they grew increasingly restive. Some began 
wondering aloud if it didn't make sense to turn back while there was still 
enough fuel for a voyage home.
    It came to a head about three and a half years into the trip, as the Light 
Through hurtled toward its point of no return.
    "It's not good, sir."
    Roger McLaren likely would have been a marine in the previous century. As it 
was, he was a dedicated Whole Earth ecocop and a decorated DNA discoverer-of 
necessity a multitasker, like everyone else on the ship. He had logged only five 
years in space prior to the voyage, but Aaron had quickly come to like his 
intelligence and his style. He had become Aaron's unofficial aide-de-camp. Aaron 
relied on him.
    The stress lines near Roger's eyes were deeper than usual. Just about every 
face on the trip other than Jack's had them now. Acceptance of death as an 
abstract is one thing; actually moving at half speed of light through a black 
void to your possible demise is quite another.
    "It's the shift we picked up again last month between Proxima and Alpha," 
McLaren continued. "There's concern that it might be enough to throw off our 
boomerang equations."
    "How bad is it?"
    "The shift's the same as last time-slight, but we're in no position to judge 
the consequences of what that means in this case. Obviously he stars aren't as 
stable as we'd assumed back in our solar system."
    "Maybe those stars were always shifting slightly, but we were unable to see 
it before Hubble II, or before we got this close to them," Aaron said. "And the 
crew?"
    "Kathy says the people who want to turn back have a near-majority now," 
McLaren said. "Even if they don't, it's getting hard to keep them in line-we 
can't watch them twenty-four hours a day."
    Aaron sighed. Like McLaren, he had learned to trust Kathy's judgment. Also 
like McLaren, Aaron enjoyed playing a little patient and doctor with her-in his 
fantasies. But if Aaron's excuse was that he was too old, McLaren's was that 
Kathy had said she was off-limits for the trip-she didn't want the complications 
of an intracabin romance. She'd said her Biosphere experience had been enough, 
whatever, exactly, that meant. Unconfirmed rumors on the Light Through said that 
maybe she had left the Biosphereans because of some quietly settled 
sexual-enticement suit against her. If that was the case, more power to her, 
Aaron thought. He was old-fashioned when it came to seduction: He liked it.
    "Any pattern in those who want to turn back and those who want to continue?" 
Aaron asked. He ran his hand through a shock of tousled white hair.
    "Yeah," McLaren replied. "Those who want to end this are the most 
experienced in space. They see the rest of us as naive dreamers."
    "Which we are," Aaron said. "And in your case, it seems like your lack of 
experience was your best qualification for this mission."
    "Thank you, sir."
    "But of course, that doesn't help us much now with our specific problem," 
Aaron said. He had given up on telling Roger not to call him sir. Perhaps 
because a part of him liked it.
    "Precisely, sir."
    Aaron sipped his Darjeeling tea and made a mental note to slightly change 
the blend. His tolerance for tea blends in the ennui of deep space had decreased 
to about two weeks. And he'd never fully adjusted to any blend brewed in the 
full 1g of their ship. His aching bones and far less than fully toned muscles 
also dearly preferred the lower g of Mars Vest-but traveling at nearly half 
speed of light gave the artificial gravity more bang than expected. Engineering 
had all it could do to keep the g at just 1, and no higher. Unforeseen 
consequences-the devil of this expedition was surely in the unforeseen.
    And that included the behavior of people.
    "Can Jack be any help with this?" Aaron asked. "He does project a kind of 
confidence."
    McLaren scowled. "He's part of the problem. Every time he opens his mouth, 
he advertises the Indian legend leering over the voyage. All of us, of course, 
already knew this, but we prefer to focus on the boomerang as our ticket home."
    "Yet you and Kathy aren't fazed."
    McLaren smiled. "As you said, sir, I'm naive."
    "Right," Aaron said.
    "And I spent nearly a year and a half with several Amazon tribes," McLaren 
said, "and I learned to respect the wisdom in their mythology. As far as I'm 
concerned, it's a plus when ancient legend and modern physics coincide. There's 
a DNA in folklore as strong as the DNA in the forests."
    "So there is," Aaron said. "You really ought to take up philosophy 
sometime."
    "Thank you, sir. I already have."
    "All right, then." Aaron stood up and clapped him on the shoulder. "We'll 
touch base again this evening."
    They shook hands and McLaren left.
    Aaron fiddled with the phone for a while.
    "Jack, you free for lunch?"


    The Connected Cafe served as both a little restaurant and personal com 
center for the ship; "Food, for Thought and Palate," said the Old 
English-lettered balsa-wood sign that someone had hung over its entrance. Like 
everyplace else on the ship, it was designed to give a highly convincing 
illusion of much more room than it physically afforded.
    The seating area was comfortable-room for everyone, though the nine-person 
crew rarely ate together. Each table had a screen that could be used to access 
anything from the ship's huge internal net and ports that could send and receive 
messages to and from home.
    A constant stream of data, largely automated, made its way back and forth. 
But this was of diminishing value to Aaron and the sanity of his crew. The 
farther the voyage proceeded, the longer the round-trip for even speed-of-light 
data between the ship and Earth-communication between the Light Through and home 
now took nearly two years to travel one way. Aaron sometimes wondered if the 
information they were sending back was actually getting back at all. No surprise 
that the crew was on edge. Absence of information was a fertile ground for 
paranoia: the mind always seems to fill in what it doesn't know with the worst.
    Jack was at his usual table, poring over his screen, when Aaron arrived. 
"All of Antarctica's been declared a Whole Earth park." He picked up his head 
and gave what passed for him as a smile. "Looks like they're finally seeing the 
light back home."
    "Don't get too excited," Aaron said. "By now they could have reversed 
themselves and turned the whole continent into a launching pad."
    Jack resumed his more customary expression. "I gather you've come to talk to 
me about the impending mutiny."
    "You don't seem too worried about it," Aaron said.
    Jack shrugged. "Columbus faced a mutiny too, and talked it down."
    "Somehow I don't find that comparison all too flattering, coming from you," 
Aaron said.
    "I'm doing my best to make sure it doesn't hurt us," Jack said.
    "Oh?"
    "The best policy with this sort of thing is to bring it to a head before it 
gets too far-while there's still room to decisively put it down. Chief Joseph of 
the Nez Perce once faced a similar situation-"
    Aaron waved the history lesson away. "I'm not in the mood, Jack."
    "So why'd you want to talk to me?"
    "Because I heard that you've been stirring people up with your talking," 
Aaron said. "You're far too intelligent not to realize the damage you could do 
to this trip by going into detail about your ideas."
    "I think the detail is just what we need at this point-let's get our worst 
fears out in the open, where we can confront them. Besides, I thought you, at 
least, had a somewhat open mind about my ideas," Jack said.
    

    "I'm not talking about my mind," Aaron said. "I'm talking about the minds of 
some of the other people on board. I'm talking about your mind, Jack."
    For the first time in the conversation, Jack looked a little surprised. "You 
couldn't think for a second that I would do anything to undermine our chances on 
this trip, could you? Surely you know how much it would do for the honor and 
reputation of the people I revere-the people who are no longer really here, and 
for whom I must therefore speak-if we succeed in our return voyage, and prove 
the words of Wise Oak to be true."
    Aaron regarded those dark brown eyes. "So what do you suggest we do," he 
asked, "to safeguard the continuation of this trip whose success we both so very 
much desire?"
    "Not much we can do," Jack answered, "except try to crystallize the 
discontent so it can be more easily countered. As I said."
    "Thanks," Aaron said sourly, and pulled back his chair to leave.
    "Not at all," Jack said. "And one other thing. I'd keep a close eye on 
McLaren if I were you. He rubs people the wrong way with his military posing."


    Aaron walked down the corridor to Kathy's office, aggravating himself with 
the distinct impression that everyone was angry at him. The lighting was 
designed to simulate sun coming through puffy white clouds, but the clouds Aaron 
saw on the horizon were much darker. Hiro Matsohito, the nutritionist, seemed to 
glower when Aaron said hello, and Bo Ivanoff, second in command of engineering 
under Sarah, didn't respond at all. Aaron was beginning to feel like Captain 
Queeg in The Caine Mutiny.
    Kathy's office was small, but its plants and light gave the sense of being 
in a soft green clearing in the woods somewhere. As always, she had some music 
from the middle of the last century playing in the background, this time the 
Elegants' "Where Are You, Little Star?" appropriately enough. Most of the people 
on the ship only tolerated her peculiar taste in music, but Aaron loved it.
    Kathy motioned him to a seat and smiled. The sheen of her jet-black hair and 
keen blue eyes were as distracting as ever. "McLaren filled me in," she said. 
"You want my take on what he told you?"
    "Please. I also had a little talk with Jack about this."
    Kathy frowned. "He's really not the cause of any of this. We'd be dealing 
with the same problem around now even if he never said a word. You know 
that-we've been talking about it for years."
    Aaron nodded.
    "One of the things I learned pretty quickly in the Biospheres is that closed 
environments inevitably magnify doubts about their viability, to those within," 
Kathy continued. "It's that way for everyone. But some people need unattainable 
assurance from outside their surroundings that everything's on track, and 
without that, they can go out of control. Any little thing can set them off. 
Doesn't matter if the concern is warranted-like maybe it is about the 
Proxima-ACA shift-or not. And after all, we are moving quickly to the halfway 
point. It's quite understandable that even the calmest among us would be 
evaluating our options one last time, while we still have fuel enough to get 
back home."
    Aaron told her about Matsohito and Ivanoff.
    Kathy laughed. "Hiro's depressed because he lost a whole cluster of 
high-protein algae yesterday. And Ivanoff's been a boor from day one. My guess-"
    The chime for an incoming call interrupted her. The name "McLaren" came into 
being in rippling beige letters on the screen above her head. She pressed a key 
that put him on holaround, so that Aaron as well as she could see him, and 
McLaren could see both of them and everything in Kathy's office.
    "Sir ... Kathy," McLaren said. "Part of engineering's been seized. So far 
it's a stalemate. We've locked them out of most of the access, so they can't 
turn the ship around. But we need to make a crucial course adjustment in, uh," 
he looked at his watch, "twenty-three minutes. And they control that part of the 
access. And if we don't make that adjustment, God knows where we'll wind 
up-certainly nowhere near ACA."
    "Who exactly is doing this?" Aaron asked.
    "Boris Ivanoff seems to be in charge."
    "Worse than a boor," Kathy muttered. "So much for my assessment."


    The long-suffering Russian people, Aaron thought, as Kathy and he rushed 
over to engineering. How many times had he heard that damn phrase in the media 
in the past thirty years? There were two kinds of Russians afoot in the 
twenty-first century. One group, successors of Gorbachev and Khrushchev and the 
Soviets who had opened space that first tiny Sputnik crack to human penetration, 
had gone on to infuse the world and the space program with their sense of poetry 
and human destiny. Alexei Primakov was part of that group.
    But the others were forever losers. They saw their forebears as victimized 
by a brutal form of government-which indeed they were- and thought the rest of 
the world owed them a living. Bo Ivanoff was revealing himself to be of the 
second stripe. Ironic, since Alexei had recommended Bo for this mission. But 
Aaron had witnessed that kind of irony before. How many times had he seen an 
excellent dean at a university handpick an atrocious successor?
    Nikki Dee Webber, who doubled as head of communications when she wasn't 
working on programming, was standing next to McLaren when Aaron and Kathy 
arrived. Aaron could tell from McLaren's face that he was less than 100 percent 
sure about Webber's loyalty.
    "Good to see you, sir," McLaren said.
    "Aaron, I think you better talk to him." Webber gestured to Ivanoff, who 
looked like he was sweating over his console on the other side of a clear 
partition. McLaren gave Webber a look, as he did anyone who had the temerity to 
address Aaron by first name in an official encounter.
    Aaron pressed the com button. "Bo, what are you up to?"
    "You know very well." Ivanoff turned his head from the console and looked at 
Aaron without losing a beat. His hands were still deftly working the keys. "I'm 
coming to see reality after three years of illusion."
    "And what reality is that?" Aaron asked, and directed Webber's attention to 
Ivanoff's hands on the keys.
    "He can't do any more than he's already done," she said quietly. "His 
lockout from the main course program is secure. He can make sure we never arrive 
at ACA, but only we have the capacity to turn this ship around."
    "Don't play games with me," Ivanoff was saying. "You ask your buddy Jack 
Lumet about fantasy and reality. He'll tell you some idiotic Native American 
legend. Hundred percent untested. Now that the boomerang's even more in doubt, 
no way I'm going to risk my life for some cigar-store Indian. Other people on 
the ship agree with me."
    Aaron looked at Webber. She returned his gaze. Aaron wondered again about 
Hiro-and about Aviva Zerez, the bioprogrammer. He even wondered about Sarah, 
though he figured she was likely in her cabin with the odd fatigue that had 
begun plaguing her the past few weeks.
    "Get Jack over here," Aaron whispered to McLaren, then turned back to 
Ivanoff. "Surely you never thought," Aaron continued to Ivanoff, "that this trip 
was based on an ironclad scientific certainty. After all, how, under the 
circumstances, could any theory about our voyage have been really tested at 
all?"
    "I told you to stop with those philosophy games-I'm not one of your goddamn 
graduate students," Ivanoff said. "Any imbecile knows that even an untested 
scientific theory is better than an idea that comes to someone in a bullshit 
vision."
    "The boomerang effect has been scientifically demonstrated, Bo; you know 
that's true. Nothing's happened so far to make us think it won't-"
    "Right," Bo talked over Aaron. "It's scientific. I agree. It could possibly 
work. That's why I took a chance on this in the first place. But not with the 
stars themselves doing some sort of slow dance out there-"
    "-and don't sell primitive visions short," Aaron continued. "They're not 
always complete bullshit. Maybe the Iroquois somehow grasped something about 
celestial mechanics and the boomerang effect from their vantage point on Earth. 
People used spiderwebs as an antibiotic years before science found penicillin; 
they thought the webs had magical powers."
    "Very impressive," Jack said in Aaron's ear and sidled up to him. "I 
couldn't have said that better myself."
    McLaren looked like he was at great effort controlling himself from hitting 
Jack.
    "It's better we face this now," Jack said to Aaron and looked at Ivanoff, 
"when we can still control it."
    "He's right," Kathy said, with a slight sideways look at Nikki Dee that only 
Aaron could see.
    Ivanoff was shouting. "I don't give two turds about antibiotics. Just 
another fucking dangerous panacea that you Americans and English unleashed on 
the world. Ancient history now anyway."
    Aaron could feel Nikki stiffen. Maybe this was an opportunity. Her parents 
had both died of antibiotic-resistant fever in the same year, when she was nine. 
She was a ghetto kid who had somehow pulled herself up and done good things with 
her life. She didn't talk much about her past. Ivanoff likely had no idea what 
buttons he was close to pushing.
    "Antibiotics saved a lot of good lives in its day," Aaron began.
    "Ancient history, like I said," Ivanoff interrupted. "Who cares now, anyway? 
Diseases breed in Africa. Everyone knows it. They live like pigs there. The rest 
of the world had to build up immunity. But that's not my problem now. My problem 
is this damned ship."
    "Seven minutes till the course correction," McLaren said in Aaron's ear.
    Aaron nodded and looked at Ivanoff. The man's bile ran deeper than he had 
realized. Had he drawn enough of it out for Nikki to see that Ivanoff was no one 
she wanted to team with?
    Aaron confronted her. "You have the capacity to override Ivanoff."
    All heads turned toward Nikki. She hesitated.
    "You were top of your class at the Media Lab. Don't tell me you can't 
outprogram that slob in there," Aaron urged.
    "All right, of course I can," Nikki said.
    "So will you? We've got only six minutes left," Aaron said.
    Ivanoff was saying something. "Cut him the fuck off," Aaron told McLaren.
    "I don't want to die," Nikki said.
    "But don't you see? Our proceeding to Alpha Centauri is the only chance 
we've got now of not dying. The boomerang effect may well work. We might find a 
habitable planet there if not. But if we don't set the course correction, we'll 
be certain to die. We'll be headed to nowhere. And our death will do Earth 
absolutely no good-it will have no meaning."
    "You could turn the ship around," Nikki said. "We still have enough fuel for 
the trip back home. Some of us feel that makes sense. And then we could do this 
voyage again, when we work out how to carry enough fuel for the full trip out 
and return, or maybe take better account of the shifting stars."
    Some of us, Aaron thought. He wondered again about Sarah. Hadn't she seen 
this coming? Had illness impaired her judgment? Aaron sighed, and wondered whose 
judgment was really the most off here. Any normal human being had to have more 
than a dollop of queasy terror sloshing around inside as he plunged farther from 
home with increasingly less fuel to return. And yet-
    Jack mumbled something. McLaren and Kathy were silent.
    "What you're saying is not unreasonable, Nikki, but I can't do that," Aaron 
finally said. "I won't turn this ship around. The history of our species is 
filled with lost chances that took hundreds of years to be recovered-sometimes 
never at all. Look what happened to our own space program, how we nearly 
squandered the great first leaps of the 1960s. Now we're on the road again. 
We're halfway to a new star for humanity. We may never get this far again-we may 
never figure out how to carry enough fuel for a guaranteed return voyage. But 
even if the boomerang doesn't work this time, for whatever reason, we may well 
learn enough to make it work for the next ship. We'll send the information back 
to Earth, whatever happens. We might well find a planet we can orbit, maybe set 
up shop on, until the next ship arrives. Surely those kinds of possibilities 
mean something to you, or you wouldn't be here now."
    McLaren signaled that only four minutes remained.
    "We're running out of time, Nikki," Aaron pleaded.
    "You can't know for a fact that there'll be a next ship," she said.
    "No, not fact, just possibilities. But that's what the leading edge of human 
life has always been, hasn't it? Possibilities make us human."
    If Nikki was breathing, only she knew it. Aaron knew there was no point in 
saying anything more. And now time, which had been flitting inside him like a 
wild-hair electron along with the terror, turned suddenly cold and still....
    Nikki exhaled like a burst balloon. "OK," she said, only a decibel above 
audibility. "But this will take a few minutes."
    "Thank you," Aaron said.
    Two minutes left, McLaren signaled.
    Nikki pulled a keypad out of her pocket and got to work. McLaren mouthed the 
time left in seconds.
    Aaron stopped looking when McLaren mouthed "Fifteen...."
    "OK!" Nikki cried out. "I've got control of all systems back now. And I 
locked Bo out from everything. You sure you still want to keep going forward? 
It's all preprogrammed; all I have to do is press in the go code-last chance to 
say no”
    "Do it!"
    She bent her head to the keypad and looked up a split second later. "Done."
    Jack squeezed Aaron's arm. "You're better than Columbus."
    Don't be so sure, Aaron thought. At least Columbus got some of his people 
back home.
    Aaron's manipulation of people had so far gotten this mission launched, and 
had seen them through this crisis.
    But he'd have to manipulate a lot more than people to get them home from 
Alpha Centauri.









Three


    Nikki sat down in Aaron's office. She always looked older than he expected, 
but he always pictured her looking exactly as she had in the confrontation with 
Ivanoff four years earlier.
    "You're looking good, Aaron," she said, "younger every time I see you."
    "You too," Aaron lied. In fact, she not only looked older, but more worried 
than usual.
    "We seem to be about three light-months now from the Centauri system." She 
pulled out her pad and focused on its glimmering calculations.
    "Yes," Aaron said. "The orange of ACB turned really vivid yesterday. I asked 
Hiro if he could increase the output of citrus fruit-you know, in honor of the 
sister star."
    No response from Nikki.
    "That's good news, right?" Aaron asked. "I mean, our arriving in under half 
a year? We'll get there with a bit more of everything."
    "Not necessarily." She looked up with a frown.
    Here it comes, Aaron thought. "No? Why not?"
    "Well," she said slowly, "according to my latest simulations from the data 
we've been receiving, it, ah, doesn't seem that Alpha Centauri A is the star 
we're actually approaching."
    "What?"
    "I know," Nikki said. "It doesn't make sense. Up until this morning all the 
data was looking exactly as it should for ACA. Then we tarted seeing subtle but 
significant differences. Which means that the star we're moving toward looks a 
lot like ACA, but apparently isn't. I came to you with this before checking any 
further, because I didn't want word getting out and alarming everyone before we 
knew what was happening."
    "Your instincts were good," Aaron said. "But I'm not clear about what your 
new reports are showing. The star we're headed toward looks a lot like ACA but 
isn't? I assume you're not talking about Proxima, which is just a sixth of a 
light-year-ten thousand AU-from ACA? Or ACB, which is practically right next to 
ACA? I mean, we're just about fifteen AU away now, a little more than one and a 
half times the distance of Saturn to our sun, so a new course correction would 
be trivially easy if we're headed there-"
    "Aaron, please! I know the difference between ACA, ACB, and Proxima-very 
different specs. This is something else entirely."
    Aaron sighed. "What, then? A fourth star in the family that looks a lot like 
ACA?"
    Nikki shook her head no. "It's a star that looks like ACA, but differs in 
some important respects-like there's no ACB and Proxima anywhere near it. And 
some of the other stats are off."
    "Is it still showing planets?"
    "Yeah, we seem to be OK on that score," Nikki said.
    "And you're sure that we've been sticking to our preset course- no one's 
been putting in any unauthorized 'corrections'?"
    Nikki's coffee-colored cheeks flushed to a full mocha. "Yes, I'm sure. We're 
right on course-no deviations, no errors ... no sabotage that I can see."
    The word sabotage still brought Ivanoff's face to mind. Bo apparently was 
enough of a realist not to try anything crazy after they'd passed the point of 
no return. He'd been working just fine, as far as Aaron could tell. The two had 
had some heart-to-heart talks over the years. But Aaron still couldn't trust him 
the way he did Roger, Kathy, Sarah-even Nikki.
    "But we seem to be knocking on the wrong damn star," she added, "a G2 V, 
just like the Sun, just where it should be in terms of our course trajectory, 
but not Alpha Centauri A. Indeed, other than being G2 V, nothing like it, if 
these new data are right."


    Aaron walked slowly down the corridor to Kathy's office. Who really knew 
where they were heading, where they were about to arrive? Only their instruments 
knew. And these in turn were confirmable only by other instruments. A fine 
kettle of instruments they were in...
    Kathy's sylvan office looked as inviting as always. In fact, more so, 
because of Noah, her beautiful three-year-old, who greeted Aaron with a big 
smile. The boy was sweet proof that Kathy had forsaken her policy of abstinence, 
at least once, though she as "a matter of integrity" never said who the father 
was. All Aaron knew for sure, and not entirely unregretfully, was that it wasn't 
him.
    Noah's arrival had raised some eyebrows even among their generally liberated 
crew. Food and oxygen were not matters of concern-there could be more than 
enough to go around in the ship's self-generating biosphere. And one more body 
added no extra burden on the boomerang. But bringing a child into the world when 
that world was a ship in flux with no certain voyage of return did seem a touch 
irresponsible, if not insane. On the other hand, those who saw humanity's 
destiny in space usually viewed a bigger population as an important precondition 
for expansion to the stars. "Love productively in low g" was the modest graffito 
seen in many a crystalline warren of Mars Vest. Tea wasn't the only pleasure 
especially savored there.
    After Aaron had recovered from the initial shock of Noah, he'd looked in the 
mirror and realized Kathy was entitled to her decision- who was he or anyone to 
insist that her right to motherhood be sacrificed to this trip, especially in 
view of the trip's uncertainty-and he appreciated the vote of confidence in 
their voyage that Noah's existence declared. Now, three years later, he exulted 
in the little boy, delighted in being the grandpa he'd never been back home.
    Linda Scott's "I've Told Every Little Star," an early '60s remake of a 1950s 
hit, was playing in the background in Kathy's outdoor office. Aaron hummed a 
little harmony to it under his breath. Noah looked up at him from half across 
the light-managed clearing and sang some notes too.
    "Here, take a look at this." Kathy pushed a sheerscreen over to his side of 
the picnic table. She had an identical image on hers. Aaron had already e-mailed 
her about Nikki's discovery.
    "It's a workup I just did of the main possibilities," Kathy continued.
    "Branch A assumes we are, notwithstanding Nikki's report, still on course 
and three months away from ACA. How to reconcile this with what she told you?
    "One, Nikki's incoming data are wrong, and/or her simulation process is 
faulty; because the source of either or both of the above is sabotage; or, the 
source of either or both of the above is natural noise or error.
    "Two, our stats on Alpha Centauri prior to now, until Nikki's sim today, 
have been wrong. Since this info goes back more than a century, sabotage can 
almost certainly be ruled out; persistent natural error would be the only 
reasonable source.
    "Three, Nikki has uncovered a brand-new star, right next to Alpha Centauri 
A, which for whatever reason has been unknown to us until now, and whose 
properties now include cloaking the presence of ACA, ACB, and Proxima. Maybe the 
star came into being on little cat's feet, maybe it's been hidden from us by 
some superior alien intelligence; who knows? This in a way is a special case of 
Two, above, but I liked it so I gave it a separate number. Highly improbable. 
But I like it.
    "Now Branch B. It accepts the most obvious upshot of Nikki's report: We are 
in fact quickly approaching a star that not only is not ACA, but nowhere near 
it. Assuming that number Two above is not the case, this in turn means that 
we've been traveling in a wrong direction for quite some time. The same 
dichotomy of sabotage/natural error as a source of this mistaken course applies, 
though why would Nikki or anyone deliberately do anything to misdirect the 
voyage in the past four years, since we passed what we thought was the halfway 
mark? What could they hope to gain? Having passed that halfway point, we have 
enough fuel only to reach the ACA family-all other stars, including Sol, are 
beyond range. This mistaken-direction hypothesis also carries an implausible 
burden of the coincidence that a course error brought us to another G2 V star.
    "So there you have it."
    Aaron exhaled slowly. "Fine analysis, as always. And I guess we'd do better 
starting with the assumption of everyone's trustworthiness at this point."
    "What does trustword mean, Momma?" Noah piped up.
    "It means someone's telling you the truth, and also wants to do good things 
for you," Aaron said. "Sort of both, mixed together."
    "Oh," Noah said, satisfied for the moment.
    But he wouldn't be satisfied for too long, Aaron thought. Noah was a 
prodigy-in his speech, his reading, but most of all his understanding. The only 
kid that Aaron had ever seen with a comparable mind was Jack, and that was when 
Jack was, what? Ten? More than three times Noah's age. Maybe the human brain 
developed faster, deeper, at half the speed of light in deep space. Maybe that's 
the way people were supposed to be; maybe something about growing up on a planet 
whirling around and around the same old sun somehow stunted cognitive growth. 
Centrifugal retardation that the whole species suffered...
    "So what now?" Kathy asked.
    "Well, we've got to expand your workup to consider how each of those 
possibilities will affect our chances for survival, the crew's attitudes, all 
the pertinent variables."
    "Why is it I know the 'we' in that will boil down to 'me'?" Kathy smiled. 
"It's OK-Sarah's been all right the past few years; everyone else has been so 
healthy so far that I've plenty of time on my hands even with little Mr. 
Trustword over there." She threw a kiss to her son. "But we may not need an 
expanded workup anyway-does it really make a difference to the success of our 
mission if we get to one Sol-type star four light-years away or another?"
    "You're beginning to sound like Jack already."
    "Well, think about it," Kathy said. "A G2 V star has pretty much the same 
likelihood of habitable planets around it. The same chance-"
    "If it's not a triple star, all bets about the boomerang effect are off," 
Aaron said. "Shifting stars is one thing. Two out of three missing is something 
quite else-it will shoot holes light-years wide in our projections."
    Kathy shrugged. "There's no reason our ship's biosphere can't keep going for 
dozens of lifetimes, wherever we end up."
    Aaron looked at her. "You want to spend the rest of your life on this ship? 
You want Noah..." He looked at the boy and was glad to see that he apparently 
wasn't listening. Aaron shook his head. There was a lot that he still did not 
fathom about Kathy, about everyone on this ship. He resumed talking, more 
quietly. "Even I with my bottomless confidence would like to know where in this 
universe we're going now. When we reach that star, whatever it is, we'll have a 
lot of life-and-death decisions to make, and it would be nice to know just a bit 
about where we actually are. Don't you agree?"
    "Well, the only way we'll really know more about where we're going is to go 
there," Kathy replied. "In the meantime, the best source of answers is in here," 
she gestured to the little screens shadow-pulsating under her fingertips, "in 
digesting and redigesting every ounce of this data."
    "Yeah," Aaron said, "the good old bovine, quadruple-stomach method of 
science. Keep me posted."
    He tousled Noah's hair and left.


    Two thousand three ... two thousand four? Aaron couldn't remember the exact 
year, but he could picture the room precisely. Donna sitting in the front row, 
half his age, twice his bedmate, his sole indiscretion, crossing her legs 
seductively ... The hot June air of Washington Square Park steaming the room 
because the air conditioners at NYU were always broken ... Donna looked a lot 
like Kathy, didn't she? And he lectured on....
    "... about one of the big paradoxes of computers and technology: They're 
most useful, you see, precisely in those areas where we don't already have means 
of gaining knowledge. But this very value makes us incapable of corroborating 
the accuracy of computers where we most need them-because our only reliable 
sources of knowledge in these new areas are the technologies whose very 
performance is what we'd like to verify...."
    Donna's eyes closed, her mouth opened.... Maybe she was fantasizing about 
him, her eyes in early, merry REM....
    Aaron saw the lecture all over again in his mind. He soaked in the impressed 
expressions of his students one more time. It was one of his best lectures, no 
doubt about it. But the last thing he wanted to do right now was play the lesson 
of his lecture out in this strange reality, where everyone's life was at stake, 
including little Noah's. Those who can, do. Those who can't, give lectures....
    McLaren joined Aaron and Sarah in the central data room. Aaron had McLaren 
bring along Aviva, who was not only a computer programming geneticist but also a 
computer artist in her spare time. Her work had received favorable notice at the 
Jerusalem World's Fair two years before they'd left-"She does impossible things 
with a light brush," "A new mistress of the palindromic image, aptly suited to 
her name," the reviews had said. Aaron agreed. He liked what he'd seen of her 
pixel dabbling on the trip. She was a quiet, even shy person- dark hair, dark 
lashes, dark eyes-the least known to Aaron of the crew. But she seemed to see 
with a clear inner light that burned to overcome impossibility. That's what the 
critics had seen. Maybe it came from her being half Israeli and half 
Palestinian.
    Aaron asked Sarah to preside. He still worried about her, even though her 
symptoms had disappeared shortly after the Light Through had passed the halfway 
point to Alpha Centauri. Perhaps she, like everyone else on the ship, had deep 
fears about proceeding past the point of no return, and had turned those fears 
against herself, so they made her ill. Aaron scowled. He didn't really believe 
in that kind of psychology. What he did believe was that Sarah had helped make 
this trip possible.
    She turned on the screens. They lit up with before-and-after shots of Alpha 
Centauri A, or whatever was really on them. Sarah's hair flared around the 
edges, computer light spilling over her ethereal, prematurely white filaments, 
as she leaned in and pointed out the differences in the two star shots. Aaron 
could see them immediately-could see what had caught Sarah's attention-large 
amounts of free oxygen and hydrogen, likely in liquid form, suddenly circling 
the new star in today's images.
    "Anything new in the readings other than the H and O?" Aaron asked.
    "Difficult to say," Sarah said. "The new colors are so intense that they're 
essentially cloaking the star-so a large part of what is behind the colors is 
bleached out and inconclusive. We could recalibrate our equipment to get beyond 
the new glare, but that could take some doing, because the glare itself is 
continuously changing. And recalibrating would, of course, introduce a whole new 
set of problems."
    "Right," Aaron said. "The one thing we don't want to do is mess around with 
our equipment and its settings now-we need to keep them as constant as possible 
to gauge what we're seeing out there."
    "And we're sure that our equipment is working properly now?" Aviva asked. 
"Color errors are among the most common minor failures with sims and the like. 
Some of my best paintings take advantage of them."
    "We have quintuplicate-trebled redundancy and then some in the central sim 
net-more redundancy than sperm in ejaculate-and all the systems show the same 
thing," Sarah said. "The source-data feed is of course ultimately singular-it 
comes from one origin, the star-but independent tests of the data entry points 
show that they're all functioning just as before."
    "So as best as we can tell, what we're seeing out there is reality: an Alpha 
Centauri A-type star with large new amounts of hydrogen and oxygen, likely 
liquid, around it," Aaron said.
    "That's it," Sarah said. "And in the same exact position as ACA itself has 
been for the entire extent of our voyage."
    "So why would it change now?" Aaron wondered aloud.
    Sarah held her arms up in an I-have-no-idea gesture.
    "Any history at all of ACA having such, ah, eruptions?" Aaron asked McLaren, 
whom he'd asked to do some hurried research.
    "None, sir."
    "Any sign yet of Alpha Centauri B or Proxima out there?" Aaron asked. "If 
those two are still in the picture, then our boomerang calculations could well 
hold."
    "Impossible to say with one hundred percent assurance," Sarah said. "The H 
and O color blooms would block out any lesser light in the area. We could 
recalibrate the equipment to give us finer readings in the peripheries, but-"
    "Right, we've just been down that road," Aaron said. "OK, then, let's look 
at the other side of this coin. What are the dangers to us of proceeding to this 
new star, or this enhanced ACA, or whatever it is?"
    "So we're accepting as fact, then, that we're not way off course- say, four 
light-years from Sol in some other direction-and that these new readings are in 
reality where Alpha Centauri used to be, always has been?" Aviva asked.
    "We're not ruling out anything," Aaron said. "But the course logs are so 
clear and secure that, for the time being, yes, we'll assume that our course is 
correct-that what we're seeing is Alpha Centauri in some form or other."
    "We don't have much of a time being, if you don't mind my saying so," Aviva 
said. "Just one hundred eighty odd days."
    "No, I don't mind," Aaron said. "In fact, I appreciate your thoughts; that's 
why you're here." And he meant that-the last thing he needed in this sort of 
crisis was a bunch of yes-drones. That was one of the reasons he'd wanted people 
rather than robots as the crew in the first place.
    McLaren cleared his throat. "The main danger is explosion-hydrogen and 
oxygen are obviously very combustible. But more likely, in the presence of a 
star, they'll turn into steam."
    "Which should clear away and reveal to us what we're really heading to?" 
Aaron mused.
    McLaren nodded. "The question is when."
    "So our only option," Aaron said, "is what? We continue just as we've been, 
to a class G2 V star that may or may not be ACA, except with an ocean of 
hydrogen and oxygen around it, that may or may not turn to steam sooner or 
later, and show us where we're really going?"
    "That's how I would put it," McLaren said. "But that option isn't so 
terrible. After all, Columbus thought he was on his way to the Orient, and 
discovered something else that was pretty good."
    Great-now McLaren was starting to sound like Jack too. By the end of this 
trip, his whole crew would be Jacks.
    "Aaron," Sarah called out excitedly from a far screen. "Come have a look at 
this."
    Aaron hustled across the room. "Tell me what I'm looking at," he said. As 
fast as his mind processed words and ideas, that's how slow it usually was to 
make sense of new images.
    "H2O," Sarah answered. "Hot blessed steam."


    Jack and Aaron took their dinner by the droplet lake in Hiro's garden the 
next evening. Aaron loved this little piece of water, dappled with the light of 
an artificial sun in various shades of ascension and setting, one of the real 
triumphs of biospheric engineering on the ship. He did some of his best thinking 
lying on his back in a half-submerged float, slapping the top of the water with 
his palms as if he were playing a conga....
    He brought a tray to the table for Jack and him. "So you think the bigger 
significance of all this is we're being given a series of challenges by some 
greater force in the universe, and our best response is o calmly accept them, 
because that way we'll overcome them?" Aaron asked.
    Jack put a slender, multicolored stalk in his mouth and smacked his lips. 
"Hiro outdid himself with this carrot hybrid this time. Marvelous."
    Aaron sipped his soup slowly. It was also quite good-a sort of airy version 
of miso. Star soup, Hiro called it.
    Jack closed his eyes as if further savoring the carrot stick, or consulting 
some inner oracle for a suitable response to Aaron's question. "What else can we 
do?" he said at last.
    "Then we're pretty much wasting our time with all of our science-all of our 
expert, mathematically informed analyses," Aaron said ironically.
    Jack shrugged. "You already know what they'll tell you. ACA for some reason 
released a large amount of free hydrogen and oxygen. It's either the first time, 
or for some reason it hasn't been visible to us before, or whatever. Who knows, 
maybe our very approach somehow triggered the release, like a cloaking defense 
mechanism. Maybe the star's like a big skunk. That's consistent with grand 
quantum mechanics, isn't it?"
    "No, not really," Aaron said. "Grand QM operates on mesoscales- what you can 
hold in your hand-not star-size phenomena. And-"
    "-And the heat of the star turned those elements into water: steam," Jack 
continued, apparently unconcerned with Aaron's GQM correction. "And the steam is 
clearing, and revealing Alpha Centauri A behind it, and ACB and Proxima just 
where they should be. That's a happy ending to this episode, isn't it?"
    "No, not entirely," Aaron said.
    The speed with which the next stalk was about to enter Jack's mouth slowed 
just a fraction. "Why not?"
    "Because the free liquid hydrogen and oxygen could've been fuel for our trip 
home," Aaron said. "Our engine has that capability-just like the early Delta 
series."
    That stopped Jack cold. "And the steam the hydrogen and oxygen produced is, 
I assume, no use as a fuel? No help for either the chemical or the fusion part 
of our star drive?"
    "Right," Aaron said. "Steam power's no option here in deep space."
    "Well, you know, steam power has surprised Western civilization before," 
Jack said. "The British admiralty in the 1830s confidently predicted that steam 
was too unreliable to ever be of any use in naval operations-"
    Aaron shook his head. "We don't have time for general principles about 
unexpected uses of technology now."
    "You're wrong, my friend-looking for unforeseen opportunities is all we have 
time for," Jack replied. "The moral of this hydrogen and oxygen thing is that 
we're heading into the unexpected. Radically, ultimately unexpected. Unexpected 
by an infinite margin more than anything we've ever unexpected before. You've 
got to be open to any and every thing the cosmos may see fit to offer you in 
such environments. That's the only path to survival. Who knows, maybe that star 
will fart out something else that we can use as a fuel. Maybe we'll fly into 
something useful from another star. That's the only way."
    "And that was Wise Oak's way?" Aaron asked, not sarcastically at all.
    Jack nodded. "You're going to see Kathy later, right? Here, give this to 
Noah-something I made for him."
    It was a small wooden doll, done up in the Iroquois sachem style.









Four


    Aaron was warming his hands by the cyberplace in his office when he got the 
news. The room temperature, of course, could have been set higher, but sometimes 
he purposely set it at chilly, just for the joy of the crackling heat of the 
cyberfire upon his body and face. The flames were simulated, but their pleasures 
were real.
    "Come see!" Noah poked his head in the door and said with glee. "Our star 
looks like the sun!"
    Aaron could have called the image up on the office screen, but instead he 
let Noah take him by the hand to the real-view window.
    "See? Just like the sun! Maybe smaller." Noah, of course, had never seen Sol 
with naked eyes, but he had seen it plenty of times-and from plenty of inner- 
and outer-planet perspectives-on screen.
    Aaron beamed at the golden handball shining through the window. He had 
looked at Alpha Centauri A just yesterday, but today it indeed seemed to have 
broken through some barrier, like a tomato ripening from white to color, and for 
the first time it looked decisively like a sun, not a star. It was better than 
the best sunrise he had ever seen on Earth.
    Alpha Centauri B, more than four-fifths ACA's mass but just a third of its 
luminosity, looked like a big orange moon beside ACA. Proxima Centauri, just a 
tenth of ACA's mass, was a feeble, flickering throb, a ghost of pale diamond in 
the backdrop. "Here am I, with Noah in the Sky with Diamonds," Aaron said.
    Noah laughed. "Momma's song says Lucy!"
    Aaron smiled. "But you're here with me now." He pointed beyond the window. 
"The sun'll be growing every day now, more and more."
    Noah looked dubious. "You mean like a flower? Momma has flowers that grow 
every day."
    "Yes," Aaron said. "Especially like the face of a flower, with petals that 
get bigger every day."
    Noah's face scrunched up. "But flowers have stems. Momma says that's how 
they get their food to grow. There's no stem out there."
    Aaron thought for a few seconds. "We're the stem, Noah. This ship, all of 
us. We feed it with our dreams come true."
    "Oh," Noah said. "Like a fairy tale?"
    "Yeah, a fairy tale." And the little boy in Aaron hugged the little boy in 
front of him.


    Imminent arrival at Alpha Centauri A tripped off a thousand tasks, which, 
like a swarm of seven-year cicadas slightly overdue, had been patiently waiting 
since the start of the voyage to come forth and clack for attention. Rerun all 
of the boomerang simulations; check them against the newly calibrated real data 
of the three stars; make sure the shuttles were all operational, ready to go 
with telemetry; triple test the robots, most of which hadn't done a thing during 
the journey; eyeball a sample of the multiple incoming recordings to make sure 
the error-free certification itself wasn't by some quirk corrupted; rerun the 
boomerang simulations yet again, just for good measure...
    Aaron was in the thick of addressing these things, dispensing instructions 
for this job and that, happier than he'd been at any time on the trip, when 
Kathy called.
    "Sarah's sick again. I'm not sure what's wrong with her. I'm in her room."
    Aaron knew immediately from Kathy's tone that Sarah was worse than just sick 
again. He rushed down the corridor.
    Kathy's face confirmed the worst. One look at Sarah, half under blankets in 
bed, face afloat in soft white hair, confirmed it even more.
    Kathy pounded on Sarah's chest and rolled back her eyelids and syringed her 
with every stimulant on board, but she was dead. She was only forty-four. How on 
Earth could that be? She had been OK these past few years....
    They weren't on Earth anymore-was that somehow the answer? For some reason, 
the universe had called her out here, via that anomalous signal from ACA, and 
then rejected her, like tissue from an alien body. Why hadn't it rejected the 
rest of them?
    Aaron looked at Sarah's face, at her breasts dead white, still pert- one of 
them blotched rouge where Kathy had pounded, petitioned in vain for life-and he 
thought of his own mortality. For all his talk about Russell-Shaw, he knew that 
Naomi hadn't been wrong years earlier when she'd said there was no hard evidence 
of its effect. There was a connection, sure, a finding that those who lived very 
long and had a contemplative existence had a 77 percent chance of having a DNA 
thread slightly out of place in a remote, minuscule area of the X chromosome. 
But genetic correlations were notoriously tricky. Russell-Shaw had also been 
found in a few people who died young. Not every philosopher lived to be a 
hundred. Blaise Pascal, no less imbued with a sense of awe at the human 
disequation to the cosmos than Jack and Aaron, had died before his fortieth 
birthday. Younger even than Sarah.
    "Any idea what the hell happened here?" Aaron asked, barely able to speak.
    Kathy performed all the many tests at her disposal. "No foul play, no 
penetration by needles, knives, poisons, projectiles of any kind. No sign of 
semen. No sign of suicide. She just... died."
    It was likely a stroke, the still-fashionable placeholder for deaths of 
unknown causes. A stroke-OK, a stroke-but what actually caused it? Small numbers 
of people still died for no apparent reason in their thirties, forties, and 
fifties-far too young to die of anything in the twenty-first century except the 
odd untreated case of pneumonia and IMMs, the weird immuno-offshoot that 
fortunately afflicted only those with a rare genotype. The dark side of genes in 
action.
    "She opened her eyes a moment before she died," Kathy said.
    "Did she ... say anything?"
    Kathy nodded. "She said, 'I came here to die. It's OK.' " Kathy took a shaky 
breath. "It was heartbreaking."
    Aaron and Kathy gently dressed Sarah and notified the rest of the crew. They 
were in shock. They discussed what to do and decided on a funeral. Jack said a 
few words about the first space angel ambassador. Then they released her, white 
hair gleaming in the yellow-orange light, o drift near Alpha Centauri... a new 
bit of matter, only this one had been sensate and intelligent just this morning.
    Sarah was the first person ever to die in deep space. Part of the first 
group of fleshly intelligence from Earth, of DNA sprouted into brain and tissue, 
to venture out this far from home. She hadn't had an easy time of it. And now 
her flesh would likely last forever-far longer than a digital photo or 
holograph, surely immune to bacterial decay or oxidation-though her brain was 
already devoid of any thought or feeling.
    "We've got to make sure this is the first and only time this happens," Aaron 
said. And everyone nodded. Everyone agreed. And everyone knew just how little 
that meant.
    Aaron was sure he felt worse than anyone else, for his was the sweet voice 
of possibility that had lured Sarah aboard the Light Through.
    Bo Ivanoff had tears in his eyes. Well, he'd be in charge of engineering 
now, and Nikki Dee in charge of programming. Aaron was glad he'd pursued the 
high road with Bo in the past years-no recriminations, no punishment, passive or 
aggressive. He'd have to rely on Bo now. Everyone would.
    They would need all the help they could get entering the Alpha Centauri 
system. And even more if they were to leave it.


    Aaron called an all-hands meeting for the very next day. Aviva, Hiro, Nikki, 
and Bo joined Jack, Roger, Kathy, and Aaron in the cafe, with Noah napping on 
the mom-screen. His sleeping image hung like a cybergraphic angel above. Kathy 
didn't feel comfortable about leaving him alone, and if she did, she at least 
wanted to stay in virtual touch with her son.
    "Sarah would've wanted us to focus on the demands ahead," Aaron began. 
"We've got lots of things to do, but here's what I see as our three most 
important jobs now: one, inspection of this star system and its planets for 
possible life; two, relaying as much data as we can back to Earth; three, 
keeping focused on how we get back home."
    Ivanoff grunted at the mention of this last task.
    "Bo," Aaron said, "you're our best expert now on propulsion and the 
boomerang effect. How about your going over again exactly what we should be 
looking for to see if it's happening."
    "OK. We've already reduced our approach speed, as you know," Bo replied. "We 
need to break about ten percent more to avoid being sucked into the star. If we 
steer this just right, we'll be whipped around the back of ACA, and come around 
the other side with an added kick from ACB and Proxima to give us an 
acceleration high enough to send us back on our way to Earth at half speed of 
light."
    "The river that flows both ways," Nikki said. Her tone was neither sarcastic 
nor especially confident.
    "Yeah, but it's a tricky river," Bo said. "Slight errors in the speed or 
approach angle could lose us in the star, send us off in a wrong direction, or 
leave us here as permanent guests of Alpha Centauri. And the position of Proxima 
relative to ACA and ACB is less stable than we thought from back on Earth-the 
shift that launched this whole project in the first place was probably just the 
first expression of some trend toward instability over here. I tried to tell all 
of you that four years ago."
    "I know, Bo," Aaron said, and tried to look conciliatory. To himself he 
thought: So if I'm wrong, I'll leave a note of apology to you and all on my 
personal screen for all the stars in the universe to see. At least I tried.
    But then Aaron looked up at Noah-he hadn't volunteered to be here. He 
deserved more.
    "So if the boomerang works," Kathy said, looking at Aaron, "we won't be able 
to actually spend any time on any of the planets, even if we find them thriving 
with life." Her dream, Aaron knew, her likely mother's magic faith that kept her 
going in the face of doubt, was that they would find a planet to live on out 
here. And if not, she was willing to settle for life in the Light Through's, 
biosphere.
    "That's right," Bo said. "We'll of course be able to close-scan them, and 
leave some unpersonned probes behind, but that'll be it. The original trip, 
remember, was planned with robots in mind."
    "Pity," McLaren said.
    "Not to any life forms that may already be there," Jack said quietly.
    Kathy gave him an exasperated look.
    "Good thing they have you around to look after their interests, then," Bo 
said.
    For a second, Aaron wondered again exactly why Jack was even here on this 
voyage, given his heartfelt misgivings about molesting the natural scheme of 
things. But Aaron already knew. Jack was here to help prove the validity of Wise 
Oak's wisdom, to demonstrate that star currents indeed flow both ways-and having 
done that, to leave the stars as untouched as possible. As perhaps some part of 
Jack really believed Wise Oak had done already?
    "So when can we expect the first confirmed reports on the planets?" Aviva 
asked.
    "As soon as two to three days, maybe," Nikki said. "Depends on just where in 
the system the planets are, how big they actually are, that kind of thing."
    "And how long after that before we verify that the boomerang is working?" 
Aaron asked.
    "Same factors," Bo said. "Could be days, could be weeks, maybe even 
months-depends upon how close the planets are to the star, precise relationships 
between the three stars, whether there are any planets around the other two 
stars-whole bunch of stuff. We have contingencies for most of those 
configurations. How they'll work, of course, depends upon our exact escape speed 
as we round the star. But we don't know that yet, and we can't make course 
corrections on a course that doesn't yet exist."
    "In the interim, we'll look for sources of fuel, signs that any of the 
planets might be able to support us-anything that we can latch on to," McLaren 
said.
    Bo took that as a comment responsive to his concerns, and nodded vigorously 
in agreement.
    Aaron noticed that Nikki was engrossed in her earpiece, her head bobbing 
slowly, nostrils flaring out and in as she followed some sort of blow-by-blow 
report from one of the ship's autocoms. Had to be something major to pull her 
away from this conversation.
    "OK," she finally said to herself, sucked in a breath, and looked at Aaron. 
By then she had everyone's attention.
    "Scan's spotted something on the screen," she said with awe, and controlled 
jubilation.
    "Our first planet?" Kathy shouted.
    "No," Nikki said, lips trembling. "Too small for a planet, and it just seems 
to be drifting out there."
    "Well, what then?" Aaron said, almost shouting himself. "It looks 
artificial. Maybe a ship."


    What is it about cosmic space, Aaron wondered, that invites certain people 
to leave their comfortable planet, pulls nine of them into a ship, now ten, now 
nine again, in pursuit of starlight four light-years from home?
    Making contact with alien intelligence actually wasn't high on Aaron's list. 
He'd always been a pragmatist about intelligence in the universe other than the 
human kind on Earth-like Fermi, Aaron would have expected it to have already 
arrived in some scientifically confirmable way on Earth, had it existed out 
there, out here. After all, considering how apparently unique the biological 
process of intelligence was around old Sol, and how likely humans would be in 
the future to search as hard as they could for any trace of it other than their 
own, Aaron figured that alien intelligence would want to do the same.
    Yeah, he knew the argument that alien intelligence could be so different 
from ours that we might never be able even to recognize it as intelligence. But 
if that were the case, if human and all other alien intelligence were indeed two 
blind ships passing in the night, fundamentally incapable of exerting any 
influence on each other, what was the point of even talking about an alien mind? 
Why bother with it, as Haeckel had said about Kant's insistence that the 
ultimate inner cores of things-things-in-themselves--were forever closed to 
human perception and understanding?
    Of course, it was also possible that intelligent alien life could be all too 
human in motive, enough like the intelligent species on Earth to deliberately 
want to remain secret, to visit Earth only in a hands-off way. Or maybe alien 
intelligences were much younger than humans and incapable of deep-space travel 
or communication, or much older, and burned out, or perhaps totally telepathic 
and ethereal, and thus not in need of any tangible technology at all.
    But these seemed rather too neat alternatives to a more obvious reason that 
humans knew no technological intelligences other than their own: guess what, 
there were none.
    But Aaron was not dogmatic about that. He accepted that all heories and 
reasoning and ideas were fallible, including his own.
    So a hulk of empirical evidence making itself known to their sensors, 
apparently shattering his lack of expectations about alien intelligence, 
thrilled him. Even as a part of him held on to an underlying feeling that the 
hulk might be something else.
    But what?
    Nikki was able to ascertain the following about the hulk: It seemed not of 
Earthly origin, or at least not made of materials known to twenty-first-century 
civilization, though it was of the same general size and spherical shape as 
their ship, which is why they thought of it as a ship at all; it had nothing 
that looked like writing or pictures on either its exterior or what could be 
scanned of its interior; it seemed indeed to be drifting, as no sort of 
propulsion or steering could be discerned in its motion; it apparently had no 
form of DNA life or robotic intelligence on board, though the scans picked up 
traces of some compounds that could have once been protein.
    Which was why Aaron had taken to calling it a hulk.
    "It seems we have a dead ship floating in space," he said at the meeting of 
the assembled crew the next morning. He'd been awake for more than twenty-four 
hours now, as had everyone else.
    "Could it have been the source of the anomalous signal they picked up from 
here back on Earth before we left?" Kathy asked.
    Aaron winced involuntarily. The anomalous signal made him think of Sarah, 
and how she had helped get their voyage over the last hurdle to its launch....
    "Impossible to say," Nikki replied. "It's not doing anything now."
    "How do we know it's a ship?" Jack asked.
    "We don't know for sure," Nikki said, "and we can't risk changing our course 
now to take a better look. But that's our best guess. Certainly it could be 
something else entirely."
    "Maybe a ship from another civilization that came here planning to get back 
on the boomerang, and look what happened to it," Bo said.
    "Or maybe a ship from a technological planet we've yet to see, closer to the 
star-a discarded early model of a fleet that will soon be here to greet us with 
fruit and flowers, and toys for Noah," Kathy offered.
    "I like Kathy's scenario better than Bo's," Aviva said.
    "I do too," Bo said, "but what do you suggest we do?"
    "Dispatch one of our robotic planet probes to the, ah, artifact. Can we do 
that? Do we all agree this is worth the expenditure? We may wind up with one 
less to land on the planets or investigate other objects we might find later 
on," Aaron said.
    Bo nodded his head yes. "Programming the probe is easy. And I think it's 
worth the vehicle."
    "I'm certainly in favor of that," Kathy said.
    "Me too." Aviva nodded.
    Aaron looked around at the rest of the group. Hiro, Nikki, and McLaren gave 
their assent. So did Jack, but he didn't look very pleased.
    "Jack?" Aaron prodded.
    He made a noncommittal gesture. "OK with me if that's what you want. 
Advanced technological artifacts are not really my area of expertise."
    "Excuse me, but what the hell is?" Bo said.
    Jack smiled serenely. Most of the others laughed uncomfortably.
    "Right," Aaron said. "Let's all get some sleep, then, and reconvene tomorrow 
morning for breakfast. I have a feeling we're going to have a lot of sleepless 
nights ahead."


    He was awakened four hours later by a call from Nikki.
    He thought he was dreaming, till the pitch of her voice settled unmistakably 
into the reality center of his brain like a plate clattering into coherence on a 
polished table.
    "Sorry to wake you," she was saying, "but an urgent private message just 
came in for you from David Percival."
    Aaron fumbled with his phone and the absurdity of an urgent message sent 
almost four years ago. "OK," he said groggily "put it on my screen and I'll be 
back to you after I've seen it."
    Aaron hadn't heard from Percival since the day they'd left. A few bland 
birthday greetings from Naomi and his children-always arriving a day or two too 
early or late-were indeed the only private messages he'd received at all from 
Earth and Mars on the voyage. He'd written a long confidential report to Alexei 
Primakov after the Ivanoff crisis. He'd wanted not so much to denounce Ivanoff 
as to let the people back home know how unstable the crew had become, in hopes 
that better care would be taken in choosing the next one, if ever there was one, 
in case Aaron didn't return to review this voyage in person. But after writing 
the report, he'd realized that things had gotten better with Bo, and a report 
about a near-mutiny on the first starship might do more harm than good back home 
for the prospects of another star voyage. So the report was never sent.
    Now Aaron punched up Percival's message on his screen, unscrambling it with 
a personal code that even his grandmother wouldn't have known: her middle name, 
anagrammatized, and with two arbitrary symbols added before and after.
    Percival's urgency became clear right away.
    "The political situation's deteriorated at home," Percival's tense face told 
him. (So what else is new, Aaron thought.) "JFC's wing of the party was hurt by 
some new revelations uncovered in secret documents from the nineties." (Aaron 
rolled his eyes and reiterated his thought.) "Naomi felt her campaign needed 
some good news, and has claimed to have received some communication from you 
indicating that, even though you're still less than halfway to Alpha Centauri, 
your sensors have confirmed the existence of intelligent life in that area. I 
and the others, of course, know this isn't the case-the message she produced 
from you lacked the special signature icons we agreed upon, and your getting 
confirmation of anything regarding Alpha Centauri from more than four 
light-years out isn't very likely. So far, we've kept our mouths shut, because, 
as ever, we don't want to do anything to injure the future of the space program. 
But obviously we're not very happy. I guess sleep with the devil and all 
that-but damnit, this isn't science anymore, it's a bloody travesty. Anyway, we 
know there's nothing you can do about this, but I wanted you to get this message 
before you actually arrived at ACA. Who knows, maybe you'll find something there 
to make an honest woman out of that political bitch."


    Aaron stared at the screen for a long time. What struck him most was the 
irony, the perverse coincidence, of his receiving this information about Naomi's 
lie just after encountering something that might make that lie true. And 
Percival alluding to that very possibility at the end of his message. There was 
an old book by Arthur Koestler about coincidences, in which he argued that there 
really were none-just connections that were not apparent, or for some reason 
disguised. Aaron was inclined to agree.
    But given what they had so far actually scanned and analyzed of the hulk, it 
likely wouldn't provide anything close to a confirmed discovery of intelligent 
life in the area-certainly not an intelligence currently alive. But this 
wouldn't be the first time that someone in the mean streets of science and the 
real world had shot first and asked questions later and come up a winner. Hadn't 
Aaron done this himself on this very expedition?
    He found he didn't share Percival's outrage about what Naomi had done. Yes, 
it was a mockery of science, but then again all science he had ever known had 
partaken of such mockery, be it political power or money or any of the other 
lubricants of human progress. Even in the supposedly purer precincts of academe, 
how many times had he kissed a dean's ass to get some esoteric course running, 
had he trawled for students like a lobsterman to meet a minimum enrollment?
    The true champion of truth was not the one who tried to pursue it free of 
political and commercial interests-for such pursuit was bound to end in 
failure-but the one who aimed to wring what truth could be had from the 
excipients that inevitably coated the truth.
    So he wasn't angry about Naomi. Queen Isabella Senzer, Jack sometimes called 
her. Whatever her motives in helping their voyage, she had made their voyage 
possible nonetheless.
    Noah had said this was a fairy tale. Naomi's story was a fairy tale- a 
gleaming white lie that might bring other voyages out here, voyages undertaken 
when maybe technology had indeed advanced enough to give them a confirmed ticket 
home. That was certainly preferable to Aaron and his people disappearing like 
some lost colony of Virginia without a trace-or worse, with no word other than 
that they had found nothing of importance. So Aaron would let this fairy tale 
stand, leavened with just a bit of reality.
    He composed a short message. It described what little they actually now knew 
about the hulk, implying without specifying that it was the source of the 
message Naomi had claimed to receive from the Light Through four years earlier. 
Her face would be saved. Science and truth would be served. Percival and 
Primakov would understand.
    Aaron could straighten things out with a later message, and more if and when 
they returned. In the meantime, he would help Naomi imbue their voyage with a 
touch of myth by relaying a story of contact with alien intelligence-which was 
more than the mute hulk had so far conclusively disclosed.
    Aaron called Nikki and told her to send his message back to Naomi and 
Percival. "Now let's all get some sleep this time," he told her.
    But science and fairy tales and Iroquois myths about rivers flowing both 
ways in space were querulous bedfellows. He fell asleep thinking that the 
farther they progressed in this voyage, the less he could tell if he was 
dreaming or awake.











Five


    Planet reports began arriving two days later. First a few dribs of much 
sharper data, then the vivid storm itself. A billion K of details per second, 
images and instant analyses from all conceivable angles. The ship soaked up data 
like a paper towel. Nikki said she could feel it list with the weight of this 
new knowledge.
    Four bodies danced into clarification on the screens-two gas giants like 
Jupiter, one hot little pill like Mercury, and in between them a Mars-type 
planet that was maybe a shade more like Earth than was Mars back home. Same 
general layout as Sol's system, with the Mars-type planet 1.19 AU from Alpha 
Centauri A-in contrast to Earth, 1 AU from Sol, and Mars, at 1.53 AU.
    These were the gems whose glint the Hubble II had first seen back in 2016, 
when Proxima and its flares had obligingly moved out of the way. These were the 
minuscule dots that had beckoned throughout their voyage.
    Planets. The one home of life, and intelligence, thus far known to humanity.
    They were in shorter supply in the galaxy than the first discoveries by the 
Hubble I in the 1990s and the new millennium had suggested. Many of the 
planetary hints seen by that generation's telescope had turned out otherwise 
under subsequent, more powerful scrutiny.
    Planets were a rare and wonderful thing. Alpha Centauri B-the orange sun-had 
none. And neither did dim, tiny Proxima.
    But the crew was not entirely thrilled with ACA's bounty. They hadn't 
counted on finding life they could talk to out here. Their wildest practical 
dream had been to find life they could eat, lean against, sleep under. But from 
the looks of this pale blue Mars around ACA, they'd likely be leaving here tired 
and hungry. If they were able to leave at all...


    "We travel all this way just to find another Mars," Jack said, "more of what 
we already see in space when we look out on a clear night from our own planet. 
There's a poetry in that."
    "More than that," Kathy said. "We've confirmed with in-person observation 
that Sol-type stars come with planet systems similar to our own. The fact that 
there's no really Earth-type planet here in ACA may be just coincidence-we could 
well find three Earths in the next G2 V our species explores, and no Mars at 
all."
    "You're both right," Aaron said. He closed his eyes and explored Kathy's 
after-dinner brandy with the tip of his tongue.
    "So our decision now, I assume, is to what planet do we devote our best 
attention," Jack said. "The gas giants are the most likely to, have something we 
can use as fuel, and Mars the Second has the most chance of harboring some happy 
little bubble of molecules we can label as living, right?"
    Aaron nodded. "For twenty years our snail space program has been doing 
little else but probing every corner of Mars for something more than a faint 
pulse of life-"
    "Like trying to arouse an unconscious woman," Jack mumbled in his wine. 
Kathy heard him and smiled.
    "-so we finally manage to escape out here," Aaron continued, "and we're 
about to start doing the same damn thing. There's some kind of lesson there."
    "Poetry," Jack said. "Like I was saying. The singularity of life. 
Parallelism. Euclid's parallel postulate-two straight lines never meet."
    "Stick to poetry," Kathy said, leaning over and refilling Jack's glass.
    "Our problem is that we have met that para-Mars out there, in our own Mars," 
Aaron said, "and that means it's not likely to do us much good."
    "Well, at least we know how to look for life on a Mars-type planet," Kathy 
said.
    "Not really," Aaron said. "Other than the microbes and that dust-mite thing, 
the closest we've come to life on Mars is that stupid face of Elvis."
    "Maybe we'll find the Jordanaires on this new Mars, and have a Memphis 
session across the stars," Kathy said and raised her glass of claret for a 
toast.
    "Who the hell are the Jordanaires?" Jack asked, and he clinked his glass 
with the other two.


    Nikki walked into Aaron's office with an expression on her face he had seen 
at least once before. "There's something strange going on with the data for Mars 
Two," she said.
    "How so?"
    "Well, what I'm seeing is ... the planet seems to be more like Earth than 
the first reports indicated."
    No point in asking her if their equipment was functioning properly. "Be more 
specific."
    "OK," Nikki said. "The first stats we had on this planet showed it was maybe 
one-twentieth more like Earth than Mars back home is. Now it seems at least 
one-tenth more like Earth-it has several bodies of what look to be water on the 
surface, rising levels of oxygen in the atmosphere, and-"
    "So is that bad?"
    "Well, no, it's not bad," Nikki said. "But I just don't see how we could 
have missed that."
    "Any signs of life?"
    "No," Nikki said. "Not yet."
    "Could it be some sort of drastic seasonal change?" Aaron asked. "Who knows 
how those things work out here, with the two extra suns and all."
    Nikki considered. "Well, I guess that's a possibility. But I'd call it more 
of a transformation.... I don't know; it seems too sudden for a season."
    "Same sort of thing we saw when ACA suddenly bloomed with oxygen and 
hydrogen," Aaron mused.
    "Seems like that, yes, could be," Nikki said. "But what's the connection?"
    "I don't know." Aaron shook his head. "But it's time we saw what's happening 
on this Mars-across-the-stars in ultimate firsthand-on the planet itself, with 
our naked eyes."


    Aaron had long ago decided that McLaren would be the one to lead any 
personned exploration teams on this trip. He had the highest combined total of 
intelligence, loyalty, and physical resilience-each quality crucial to the 
success of such exploration.
    McLaren was delighted at the prospect.
    "But understand," Aaron said. "This planet will be no bed of roses to 
explore. Not because its environment is hostile-our instruments can handle that. 
But it seems to be undergoing some kind of change, blossoming overnight with 
forests and lakes we didn't see before. I don't know, maybe that's the way the 
seasons unfold out here. But until we can track it, understand it, have some 
idea where it's going, it's dangerous. Unpredictability is our worst enemy."
    "Let's be frank, sir," McLaren replied. "We both know that getting down 
there will provide some missing pieces to this puzzle, and the safest way of 
doing that would be to send a robotic team. But we also know that even the best 
robot team would lack the flexibility and imagination of even the stupidest 
member of our species. Robots make decisions about where to look and what to do 
based on what we program into them-they have no mechanism for pursuing or 
recognizing or even reporting to us some flicker of an insect or leaf they may 
or may not have seen in the corner of their eyes. And we also know that we may 
not have time for more than one in-depth interactive interview of that planet. 
Considering the stakes involved here-could you imagine if this planet was more 
of an Earth-type world in its summer, which could support us!-we've got to go 
with people on this one. And I'm your man for the job."
    Aaron couldn't bring himself to disagree in the slightest.
    But there was one person Aaron needed to talk to before giving the final OK 
to McLaren's leading the expedition to ParaMars-his current favorite name for 
this new world that was coming to resemble Earth more than Mars. There were many 
details yet to be decided, such as hen to launch the probe, when to retrieve 
it-before or after their swing around the star? But Aaron needed to settle 
something first in his own mind-something that was no doubt none of his 
business, but weighed on whether he ought to put McLaren in a position of peril 
even greater than for those of them on the ship.
    He called Kathy. There was no answer. He walked over to her quarters hoping 
to bump into her along the way. No such luck. He waited outside her door about 
ten minutes. He felt like a fool standing around.
    He thought for a second, then used his keyword to let himself in. Might as 
well wait for her in the comfort of a chair. He'd done this before, as had Kathy 
with his quarters. They had few secrets to hide from each other, and those they 
had were by and large tucked impregnably deep within their skulls.
    Noah's door was open, and Aaron could see he was sleeping with the peace 
that only someone whose age was in the single digits could possess in this 
situation. The camera over his bed that fed the mom-screen was off, though. Odd 
that Kathy would go out and leave him alone, unmonitored like this....
    Then he heard Kathy's voice, soft and murmuring. "I was dreaming greenness," 
she was saying, "the smell of the lake in the late summer ..."
    His first instinct was to leave. Kathy sounded like she was talking in her 
sleep, and the ... the sensuality, the intimate longing of it, seemed not right 
for him to hear in these eavesdropping circumstances. But it enchanted him, and 
kept him in his seat.
    "The water so velvet," she breathed, "when it touched my skin ..."
    "You've got to accept that you may never have that again," a man's voice 
said, and it nearly yanked Aaron out of his skin. "Cape Cod is a long, long way 
from here-"
    Aaron was out of the room and halfway down the corridor before the sentence 
was finished. Kathy hadn't been talking in her sleep- she'd been contentedly 
murmuring in the arms of someone she obviously felt very comfortable with.
    Aaron couldn't say he was unhappy or even really surprised with the 
realization of who that was.
    Now he had his answer about McLaren.


    "Let's talk names." Jack was in Aaron's office early the next morning, 
plopping into the old swivel chair and putting his feet up on the desk before 
Aaron had a chance to take his eyes off the screen and say hello.
    "OK, sure," Aaron answered. "But of what?"
    "You know what."
    "You mean of the new planets out there?" Aaron gestured in the direction of 
the real-view window.
    "Exactly," Jack said. "Let's do better than our forebears on this."
    "Meaning?" Aaron knew what Jack meant, but had discovered long ago that it 
was always better to let Jack talk.
    "Come on," Jack said. "Remember the IRT line in the Bronx? You'd ride down 
it and see the names fly by on the stations-Gun Hill Road, Burke Avenue, 
Allerton Avenue, Pelham Parkway-a bunch of ridiculous names, really, that had 
nothing whatever to do with the people who first lived there, nothing to do, for 
that matter, with us and the people who currently lived there. We've got to do 
better here."
    Aaron's thoughts jerked back to the Bronx and the old IRT elevated subway 
and its shaky, clacking ride. God, that was a lifetime ago.
    He focused again on Jack and his demanding gaze. Just like him to worry 
about names when a hundred more important things were yelping for attention. 
"You seriously think there may be another intelligent species out there?" Aaron 
asked.
    "Well, someone other than the human species presumably made that hulk-"
    "Not necessarily," Aaron said. "For all we know, some earlier human 
civilization got here first. Hell, for all we know, Naomi Senzer finally got 
funding for a faster-than-light drive scheme that tested out and she beat us to 
it." An unworthy little nightmare, the trumping of their voyage-not without its 
appeal in terms of their safe return and the breakthrough for humans in space, 
but highly unlikely. "And if the ship isn't of human origin, that still doesn't 
mean that it was built by any sort of intelligence from around here. Maybe we'll 
find out more if we get a chance to send another probe after we swing around the 
star."
    "Let's get back to the name of the planet," Jack said. "What are we going to 
do? Officially call it New Mars? After what-the name or the planet in our own 
solar system, the Roman name for the Greek god of war? What connection does our 
voyage have to the ancient Greeks and their glorification of war?"
    Aaron replied tiredly, "Like it or not, the science that makes this trip 
possible-not to mention your own research back on Earth, including the very mode 
of writing in the very books you pored over about Native Americans when you were 
a kid-all of this goes back to the ancient Greeks. They invented logic and 
science and mathematics. Probably anthropology and interest in ancient peoples 
too. All of it."
    "Not quite," Jack said. "The alphabet was invented by Phoenicians and the 
printing press in China."
    "Quibbles," Aaron said. "We got the alphabet through Greek culture, and 
printing had no impact until Gutenberg combined it with the winepress in Europe. 
But that's not to say that I disagree with you about New Mars being a stupid 
name."
    "And?" Jack prompted.
    "And, I told McLaren that I would leave it to him to name the planet. He's 
more than entitled-considering that there's some chance he may never come back 
from there."
    "McLaren? You're delegating first contact to him? Are you sure he has the 
sensitivity?"
    "You're full of good cheer this morning, aren't you," Aaron said.
    Jack looked sullen, stood his ground. "When does he leave?" he finally 
asked.
    "I had breakfast with him before you arrived," Aaron said. "He's set to go 
in about six hours. The plan is to pick him up before we make the loop-the-loop 
around ACA. The Light Through will be at its slowest speed-at a relative 
standstill-just before it makes the swing. Bo and Nikki have it figured that the 
shuttle's escape velocity from the planet will be just enough to make rendezvous 
with us. But that doesn't leave Roger much time on the planet. So we've got to 
do this right away."
    "I don't suppose I could somehow sneak aboard?" Jack asked.
    Aaron shook his head and smiled sadly. "I know how you feel- I wish I could 
go too. But I'm sending just one person to that planet. It's bad enough we're 
jeopardizing Roger. We've got lots of redundancy in our crew, true, and Bo and 
Nikki have done a great job taking over
    Sarah's work, but I don't want to strain that fabric any further. The rest 
of Roger's crew will be robots, and not only because they have a better 
disposition than you. They're more expendable."
    "Robots probably would've been kinder to the Incas than Pizarro's men," Jack 
said.
    "Only if they followed Asimov's laws," Aaron answered.
    Jack took the point, squeezed Aaron's hand, started to leave. He turned 
around at the door. "Does Kathy know yet?"
    Aaron thought he felt himself flush just the slightest bit. "No-I was going 
to call her after I'd gone through this batch of reports on my screen." He stuck 
his nose close to the screen to regain his composure. "If you'd like to tell 
her, though, I could use the time to work out some details with Nikki...."
    "Sure," Jack said. "Sorry to be pressuring you about all of this. You're by 
and large making the right decisions." And he left.
    Aaron's mouth hung open. This was the first time in his life he had ever 
heard Jack apologize for anything.


    Aaron got no sleep the night McLaren left.
    He thought again about Sarah. About Russell-Shaw. Death.
    Bertrand Russell was a stallion most of his life; GBS practiced abstinence. 
What conclusions could you draw from that?
    Sex had nothing to do with long life.
    Jack was more like Russell.
    Aaron had had no real understanding of death when he was younger. People 
just disappeared when they died, whether he loved them or not. He felt no 
internal connection between what caused them to die and their disappearance. 
Even with the Challenger disaster, no matter how many times he'd seen the crew's 
last walk to their shuttle, those awful waves to the wide-eyed video cameras, 
that sickly, silent explosion, Aaron could feel no real link between events on 
the screen and the deaths of flesh-and-blood people. He of course understood 
intellectually exactly what had happened. But on a gut level he could never 
actually picture the astronauts dying in that shuttle. He sometimes chided 
himself with the thought that maybe that's why he was a philosopher.
    But that emotional distance had begun to dissolve as he got older, even 
before he'd found a place in the house of the dreamers on Mars Vestibule. A 
lifelong friend had been diagnosed with a deadly brain tumor, a guy he had known 
all his life, just like Jack. He'd watched him deteriorate; he'd watched him 
die. A kid he had played sweaty handball with in the playground-calm and 
powdered now in undertaker's makeup, Aaron recalled.
    He finally seemed to be getting the message: Someone has a horrible 
incurable illness-he or she is going to die. Someone is thrust into dangerous 
circumstances-that person may well die. Wanting it not to happen isn't enough. 
What you want has nothing to do with death and its ways, Aaron realized.
    Ironically, it was easier, for some reason, to put a group of people at risk 
than a single person. The numbness of numbers. He could lead a mission of nine 
that might never come back, and not lose too much sleep over it.
    But he'd whittled this planet team down to one, McLaren, who would have no 
comrades-in-arms there except chips and optics, faithless shining connections 
that for all of their gleam were little more than sheerscreens on stilts.
    Even with the best equipment in existence, and the most carefully devised 
plans, McLaren's life was at the mercy of a universe that had often shown itself 
not terribly impressed by human equipment and plans.











Six
    

    Nikki and Kathy had a theory the next evening.
    They wanted everyone to hear.
    "We were looking for a common denominator," Kathy said. "What happened here 
on the ship three months ago when the oxygen and hydrogen suddenly appeared 
around ACA? What happened on the ship last week when New Mars suddenly began 
looking more like Earth?"
    "We'd chewed over the data to a sticky pulp," Nikki said. "The only place we 
had left to look was in here-at our own states of mind."
    "And we found that three months ago was the height of our collective 
desperation about not knowing how we would make the return trip. Some of us were 
very concerned much earlier; I know that," Kathy said, looking at Bo. Her face 
was creased in understanding. "But three months ago was the peak of our 
collective concern. Even Noah was asking me every day then how we'd be getting 
back to Earth." He was in his room now, kissed good night and snuggling under 
the covers, visible to Kathy on the ever-shimmering mom-screen. "Our nets had 
the highest incidence of notes about this then, more than four out of five. And 
when our need for an answer to this problem was keenest, it appeared in the form 
of possible fuel-oxygen and hydrogen around ACA."
    "You're saying we wished that into being?" Bo asked, and answered his 
question with an exasperated shake of his head.
    "No," Nikki said, "at this point, we're just talking correlation, not 
causation. Saying that one thing causes another to happen is a complicated 
claim-is the first variable a catalyst, a direct causative agent, are there 
other possible connections-and goes a lot farther than just noticing that one 
phenomenon was present when another occurred. But we think this is a start."
    "But the oxygen and hydrogen turned into steam," Aaron said. "It was 
worthless to us as fuel."
    "Right," Kathy said, "because by that time we were much more upset that we 
were heading to the wrong star than we were about our return trip."
    "And New Mars turned into New Earth about the time we were most concerned 
about finding a decent place to live out here if we couldn't return," Jack 
mused. "I like it. A universe so sensitive it has the courtesy to rearrange 
itself in accordance with our needs. If that's the way it's done out here, I'm 
all for it."
    Bo laughed with no mirth. "Sure. We click our heels together three times and 
get whatever we want. Ding-dong, the wicked laws of physics are dead."
    "Bohr was as much the author of that kind of thinking as Baum," Jack said.
    "Not really," Aaron said. "Bohr and Heisenberg and their quantum mechanics 
at least tried to point to a new set of laws. It was counterintuitive, the idea 
that mere observation of a subatomic particle could alter its spin, but it was 
scientific, and supported by mathematics. Anyway, I'll confess: I hate that QM 
stuff of mind over matter-it offends every materialist cell in my brain-even on 
the subatomic level. But we'd be jackasses to just ignore this pattern. How 
about we figure out a way to test it?"
    "We're going to do a few quick thought experiments-literally- while 
McLaren's still on the planet," Nikki said. "Have people earnestly hope for a 
field or a stream or a dogwood tree near McLaren, and see if he notices anything 
interesting. Probably far too simplistic a procedure, but as long as he's there 
we might as well try it."
    "Well, my biggest hope about Roger McLaren is that he's back here with us 
safe and sound," Aviva said.
    "A toast to that," Hiro said, and raised a cup of sake.
    Bo smacked his lips and grunted approval. "His equipment's functioning 
perfectly so far. His window for rejoining us opens in two days and will close 
about ten hours later. Assuming we still think it best that e rejoin us before 
we make the swing around Alpha."
    "No other choice," Nikki said. "We know much more about our speed and exact 
position on this side of the star than the other side."
    "Agreed," Aaron said. "So you'll proceed with your research, and we can 
proceed now to do justice to Hiro's sushi."
    It was soft pink shrimp, wrapped in some kind of a seaweed-bay leaf hybrid 
that Hiro had engineered, spiced with a new kind of wasabi.
    It was crisp and vibrant.


    Aaron didn't feel that way the next morning, when Bo lumbered into his 
office and spoke in his usual blunt manner. "He's stuck. No doubt about it."
    Aaron slammed his palm down so hard on the table his elbow hurt.
    "I feel the same way," Bo said.
    "But the images he sent us yesterday were so beautiful-the new lakes so 
clear-"
    "That's the problem," Bo said. "Too much water."
    Aaron looked at him without comprehension.
    Bo continued. "There's a fearsome storm raging over his part of the planet 
now. Worse than anything ever seen on Earth. We didn't calibrate for it when we 
sent him down there. New Mars was mostly desert just two weeks ago-"
    "N'urth," Aaron interrupted. "He named the planet 'N'urth' in his 
transmission last night, a combination of new, Earth, and Ur-Abraham's home-"
    "Whatever." Bo waved his hand. "The storm system down there is too much for 
his optics to handle."
    "Has the storm knocked out his launch capability?"
    "As far as we can tell, no," Bo replied. "But flying into that would be 
suicide-those winds would tear the shuttle apart."
    "Can't those robots put in some shielding? Goddamn worthless robots-"
    "There's not enough time anyway," Bo said. "We'll be well past him and on 
our way around the sun in a few hours. And even if he did launch and manage to 
stay intact, the storm would make it nearly impossible for him to rejoin us-it 
would be like trying to hit a moving target with a weapon that's shaking all 
over in your hands."
    "We come all this way and we're still at the mercy of the damn weather. How 
about those thought experiments Nikki and Kathy were talking about-maybe they 
can wish the storm away..."
    Bo looked at Aaron as if he were crazy. "They already tried that. Had no 
effect. You're not serious about that, are you? Even if this planet-size QM 
business is really happening out here, it can't be that simple."
    "I'm serious about anything that could help," Aaron replied. "Maybe the 
thought experiments somehow brought the storm into being. Something is causing 
those changes down there."
    Bo shook his head. "No one was wishing for storms. Sometimes bad things just 
happen. Look, at this point, I'd take help from the Wizard of fucking Oz 
himself, but-"
    "He was an impostor behind a curtain," Aaron said.
    Which was precisely what he felt like. The curtain was pulling back now, 
revealing Aaron naked and clueless to his crew, himself, as the universe 
applauded and filed out the exits. He had no answers. He barely had cogent 
questions. What was the best he could wish for Roger right now? That their swing 
around ACA not result in a launch speed back to Sol, so that they would have 
time to pick up McLaren after the turn, assuming the storm on the planet had 
subsided by then?
    That could save Roger, and leave them all to die here.


    Aaron and Kathy walked hand in hand with Noah, as the three went slowly 
through Hiro's misty rain forest loop in the single-spiral Haupt Corridor-so 
named because its trees and fronds very much resembled a little piece of the 
Haupt Conservatory in the New York Botanical Gardens exactly as it had been back 
in the twentieth century.
    It would almost have been too spectacular to bear, Aaron and Kathy each 
holding this star child's hand in this place in this space, had not Roger now 
been well beyond their reach. They had maybe three hours before they plunged 
into ACA's kiddie cart derby, to be whipped around to their destiny-and the 
impending event was clearly riding them rather than vice versa.
    "I'm too old for this job," Aaron said. "My brain's working, but nothing's 
coming out."
    "You've already proven Naomi wrong a dozen times on this trip," Kathy said. 
"Don't start agreeing with her now."
    Aaron smiled weakly. "I lost Roger. And I haven't a feeble megabyte of 
insight as to what exactly will happen to us just three hours from now. All of 
Jack's talk about Wise Oak, all the scientific equations about swing 
trajectories, all of your and Nikki's ideas about planet-size QM-it's getting 
harder and harder to separate the science from the fantasy out here."
    "Can I try the swing?" Noah said.
    "With any luck we all will," Aaron said, and hugged the boy's neck.
    "I'm not sure there ever was as much difference between them as people like 
to think," Kathy said. "You know the first Biosphere projects in the nineties 
were savaged by the media because some oxygen or something was smuggled into the 
Biosphere, which was supposed to be totally self-sufficient. But the media 
missed the point-as always. The important thing was that those Biospheres were 
moving ahead-demonstrating that to a large extent they could be self-sufficient. 
The fact that the science was imperfect, or the experiment was contaminated, 
less than complete, in the long run was no big deal. This ship proves that." She 
pulled down a big fern frond, and inhaled with satisfaction.
    "Well, imperfect science is great when it helps human lives," Aaron said. 
"That's the way it is most of the time, and I love it. But not if it kills 
McLaren." He ended in a hoarse whisper, so Noah wouldn't hear.
    "Noah, could you pick that flower for me, sweetheart?" Kathy pointed to a 
delicate white lily of some sort a few rungs above on the corridor. Noah 
scampered off. She turned to Aaron. "He knows more than we think," she said 
quietly. "He's very tied in to all of this. I sometimes think that Noah thinks 
my thoughts before I think them."
    Aaron looked at the boy picking flowers.
    Kathy continued, "I know how you feel about Roger. I feel the same. But this 
is what he wanted-and we may well get him back yet on the other side of the 
star. And he'll live on in Noah."
    "In spirit-"
    "In DNA, too," Kathy said.
    "What? I mean, I thought..." Aaron was certain that Jack's had been the 
voice he'd heard in her quarters the night before he'd sent
    McLaren off to N'urth. He'd never have agreed to let McLaren go if he'd 
known-
    "You think I'm involved with Jack now, I know," Kathy said.
    "Well, I..." Could she or Jack have heard him eavesdropping that night?
    "I guess it's pretty obvious, no matter how discreet we try to be. You can't 
really disguise that sort of thing, with close friends," Kathy said. "Especially 
in these close quarters."
    "It's OK." Aaron finally pulled his senses back into focus. "You don't have 
to explain."
    "But I wanted you to know," Kathy insisted. "Things were different between 
Roger and me five years ago. We were very close. And I talked to him a long time 
the week before he went on his mission to N'urth-we talked about Noah and what 
Roger really wanted from his life. He wanted to go on that mission. He wanted to 
go for himself, and for Noah, and for ... well, to help fulfill this whole trip 
out here. So the decision was his, not just yours. And he knew fully what he was 
doing."
    Aaron smiled again, ruefully. That was more than he could say for himself 
these strange days.
    Kathy moved close to him, touched his cheek with her hand, kissed his lips 
softly. "You're doing everything you can," she said.


    ACA filled up the screen, far bigger and brighter than the sun had ever 
shone in the sky at Orchard Beach in the Bronx, but Aaron knew there was no 
chance of heatstroke or sunburn. They were protected by a cocoon technology 
proven in nearly twenty years of near-sun encounters with Sol. That part of 
their science, at least, was well tested.
    So why was he sweating?
    "Temperature's eighty-four," Bo said, mopping his forehead with an ancient, 
grimy handkerchief.
    "It's supposed to be steady at seventy-two Fahrenheit-what's going on?" 
Aaron asked and looked at the clock on the wall. They were some three minutes 
from whip-around-the instant that would be their greatest proximity to the 
star-and about the last thing they needed was a heat-tile failure. Damn, that 
had almost happened on the very first Space Shuttle flight-the Columbia's in 
April 1981-but it couldn't happen with the eight layered levels of 
interredundancy they had here.
    Bo shook his head. "I don't know. The tiles are performing perfectly. I 
think we're closer to the star than we expected."
    "How could that be?" Aaron demanded. Everything up to a few seconds ago had 
been exactly on course.
    "We're checking it," Nikki said, fingers playing the keys of her console at 
what looked like near-light speed to Aaron's strained eyes.
    "Ninety-six," Bo said, "ninety-six degrees and rising at a quicker rate 
now."
    "God, it's hot in here," Kathy said. Her skin was the color of spoiled milk, 
her mouth ringed with big droplets of sweat. Her eyes drifted upward and she 
swayed. Jack was over to give her support. He didn't look too good either.
    Aaron was glad to remember that Noah was in his room with Aviva-the middle 
of the night for him. Maybe it wouldn't be so hot in there....
    No, that wouldn't do Noah any good. If the ship was in trouble-
    "One hundred fifteen now," Bo rasped. "Whip-around in forty-five seconds."
    Aaron had a vengeful headache. He took a greedy, shaking breath-the air felt 
devoid of oxygen.
    "Nikki? Anything?" Aaron's voice croaked. His throat had a fine deposit of 
sand in it now, shipped in somehow for this occasion from the deserts of Mars or 
someplace ...
    He thought to lean against the wall for support. He might have been 
slipping.
    "Nikki?"
    His neck throbbed. He jerked his eyes around to look at the clock-twelve 
seconds to whip-around.
    He went down. He tried not to. He didn't want to.
    His eyes burned and he struggled to keep them open and he thought he saw 
Kathy sprawled on the floor. Her mouth and her eyes were half open.
    Was Jack trying to say something?
    Ah, the sweet floor-thank God, the floor-thank you, it feels so good. He 
hugged it. He was grateful and shuddering. But then it turned n him, punched his 
nose. His face was running, bleeding, with some kind of blinding liquid . . .
    He was able to turn his head, lift it an inch. He saw ACA huge and red and 
all-consuming on the merciless screen.
    Nikki cried out something in the redness.
    And he wanted to ask her what she meant, but the red dress was too bright 
for him to speak.











Seven


    Aaron opened his eyes.
    Kathy was on the floor, not far from him, not moving.
    He crawled over to her. His legs felt, not broken, but too sore to stand. He 
put his ear to her mouth. Her breath felt moist. Thank God.
    "Kathy," he said softly, and touched her lips with his finger. "Kathy," he 
said again, a bit louder.
    She moaned. Her eyeballs rallied briefly beneath her lids, but they stayed 
closed.
    He maneuvered himself next to her, so her head was close to his. Her breast 
was against his chest.
    He stroked her face and kissed her forehead.
    She was wearing some sort of a two-piece outfit. He saw a soft band of 
exposed skin above her belly button. He reached to touch it with a trembling 
hand, but stopped.
    "Kathy?" he said again. He suddenly realized that he couldn't remember why 
she was sleeping. He wasn't sure if he was sleeping. Wasn't it the middle of the 
day? Hadn't the sun just been out?
    He moved his lips over her face and closed his eyes, just making contact 
with her skin, gently parting her dry lips with his tongue. He felt her arms 
around his back, her tongue probing his, and-
    She pulled away. "You give pretty good mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, Aaron," 
Kathy said dreamily.
    He opened his eyes and felt blood rush to his cheeks. "Kathy, I, ahm, I'm 
sorry, I..."
    "Shush," Kathy whispered. "It's all right." Her eyes were still closed. 
Maybe she was not yet fully conscious. Aaron wasn't completely clear about his 
own state of consciousness. Then it got very dark again....


    "We're on the other side of the star, and we're alive," someone's voice 
boomed out much too loudly from across the room. It was Bo's. Aaron realized Bo 
was talking to him.
    Aaron got up on one quivering elbow and looked in Bo's direction. He, Jack, 
and Nikki were huddled around a control panel. Jack looked over. "You two all 
right now?" he asked. "You were out like lights- longer than the rest of us."
    Aaron looked at Kathy. She looked OK-she was coming out of it. He was sure 
this was no dream now, although a few seconds ago he hadn't known if he had been 
dreaming or awake.
    She sighed and opened her eyes. She squeezed Aaron's hand and smiled at him. 
Her eyes were soft and wide. They looked happy, and-
    Suddenly they flared in absolute fright. "Noah! Where's Noah? Is he all 
right?"
    "He's fine, don't worry." Jack came over, bent down, put his arm around her. 
"Aviva said his room got a little hot, but apparently not as bad as here."
    She sagged with relief. Jack helped her up and hugged her. "Is everyone else 
OK?" she asked. "What exactly happened to us?"
    "Everyone's fine," Jack reassured her, and extended a hand to help Aaron up.
    "Like I said, we've cleared the star and we're alive," Bo said, squinting at 
a screen.
    "And?" Aaron got to his feet, walked over as steadily as he could to see 
what Bo was looking at. The tone of Bo's voice said Aaron wasn't going to like 
it.
    "And we've got maybe one-tenth of the speed we had before rendezvous with 
ACA, and we're losing even that," Bo said. "So much for your star swing." He 
bowed in bitter mock graciousness. "We'll be lucky if we have enough momentum to 
clear the first little planet here, let alone hurtle four light-years back to 
Earth."
    Aaron rubbed the back of his neck-it still ached. "You were saying something 
to me, I think," he said to Nikki, "before I blacked out-"
    "We all blacked out," she said. "You and Kathy just a few minutes more. We 
apparently passed much closer to the star than we expected. And that killed our 
chance for the boomerang."
    Bo hissed. "What chance? We might as well have done a rain dance to put out 
the fires on those nuclear furnaces out there."
    Jack started to speak-
    The com chimed. "Noah" lit up on the panel.
    Kathy took the call. "Are you OK, honey?" She tried to sound casual, but 
Aaron could hear the anxiety still thick in her voice.
    "I'm great, Momma," he said. "But I wanted to talk to you and the com 
wouldn't let me."
    "We were busy working, honey. I'm glad you're OK."
    "I'm fine, Momma. But I was wondering..."
    "Yes?"
    "Will we have time to visit Roger on his planet before we go back home? 
We're right next to it now, aren't we?"
    "Yeah," Bo said half under his breath, shaking his head and staring at 
another screen with swirling colors. "But there's no sign of McLaren on it now 
as far as I can see."


    The green forests of N'urth's northern continent filled the room-screen in 
Aaron's office the next morning.
    Aaron drank in the green like medicine for the red that still burned in his 
eyes. He imagined he might see some sign of Roger if he looked at the screen 
long enough.
    "You can't be serious about this," Bo was pleading. "We haven't heard a peep 
from McLaren since we went around the star, our telemetry can't find him, and if 
you rush down to that planet, who knows if you'll have the optics to get back 
off."
    "Listen to him, Aaron," Nikki said. "The planet's changed a dozen times 
since we first tracked it. You don't know what you're getting into down there."
    "It's been stable since we turned the star," Aaron said, eyes still fixed on 
the forests.
    "Why are you so stubborn?" Nikki asked. "We're not saying forget bout 
McLaren. We're saying wait a few more days to see what our readings turn up-"
    "No." Aaron turned his full attention to Nikki. "We need a closer look at 
this planet right away precisely because McLaren's disappeared on us. If we 
can't get back to Earth, N'urth may be our only chance for survival. I'm open to 
other options, but I don't see any at hand. Any more information on the alien 
ship?"
    She shook her head. "We've scanned it head to butt more than twenty times 
now, before and after the star, and it comes up lying dead out there every time. 
We could send another probe to look around at closer range, but I don't see even 
a flicker of energy in it."
    "It's a peculiar thing," Bo said. "Usually the closer a probe gets to its 
target, the clearer and more detailed the image. But this hulk looks just as 
blurry as the first time we saw it-even from the vantage of the robot probe, 
right up its ass. It's like the probe didn't really reach it, even though it 
seems to be there."
    Aaron sighed. "All right. So any ideas on what the hell almost shoved us 
into the star?" Hiro had come up with the wild idea that maybe the hulk had sent 
out some sort of energy beam to push them closer to the star, to somehow keep 
them from leaving. That at least would have had the virtue of making the hulk a 
place they could search for intelligence, maybe fuel, maybe an answer. But 
Nikki's readings said otherwise. And Bo-
    "I don't know," Bo said. "Our calculations were all on key. I checked them 
out again. We should have rounded the star at a completely different angle-I 
don't know what went wrong."
    "I'll be honest with you, Bo," Aaron said. "I know I pointed a gun to 
everyone's head four years ago to keep us on course to get here- but I did that 
because, all in all, I thought it was the best thing, the right thing to do, not 
because I subscribed whole hog to the star-swing theory. After all, it was only 
a theory, never tested before. But I wanted to give it an honest test, so at the 
very least, even if it failed, our failure could be of value to the people back 
home. What burns me now about what's happened to us is that it's as if some 
goddamn mysterious hand pulled us off course. We never even got a chance to try 
the swing!" Aaron pounded his fist near the edge of the screen display of the 
forest of N'urth. He was doing a lot of fist pounding these days. The trees in 
the image rippled as if in a strong September breeze.
    Bo and Nikki just looked at him.
    "So," Aaron said, "it comes to this." He gestured toward the swaying trees. 
"This planet looks like our best-our only-chance now. And I'm going there now. 
Not tomorrow. Now. In a few hours. Understood?"


    Aaron and Kathy were arguing.
    "It's insane to take the boy."
    "I'm taking him."
    "He's four years old, for crissake!"
    "I'm taking him."
    "I don't get it. You've been concerned to a fault with his safety until now. 
Why would you want him on the goddamned planet?"
    "'To a fault'? Thank you, Captain Philosopher, but after our brush with the 
star, the Light Through seems no safer than a fireball."
    "True enough," Aaron relented a bit. "But what about the psychological risks 
to Noah? Who knows what condition we'll find Roger in, and Noah could get really 
upset seeing his father that way."
    "Noah doesn't know Roger's his father,"
    "All right, but still-"
    "And I feel in my soul that Roger's alive," Kathy continued. She raised her 
voice. "Noah wants to go more than anything else in this universe.... I can't 
deny him that. Not out here."
    "This is your opinion as a scientist or a mother?" Aaron asked. Kathy wasn't 
making much sense as either. It was almost as if Noah, not Kathy, had just been 
pleading his case. But neither did Aaron want to deny her.


    Noah was on Aaron's lap, Kathy on his mind as well as on the data chairs 
across the cabin with Jack, and Hiro was at the controls as their shuttle made 
planet-fall.
    Hiro was an inspired choice-a nutritionist with excellent shuttle craft 
piloting experience. Once he landed them safely on the planet, he could feed 
them. Another benefit of their macroneural-net logic of interchangeable jobs and 
redundancy.
    That left Nikki, Bo, and Aviva back on the Light Through. They ad the 
collective smarts to run it if somehow N'urth decided to take Aaron's party 
permanently to its bosom. As for getting back home, the three on the starship 
certainly knew no less than Aaron at this point.
    The shuttle landed in a clearing near a river that shouldn't have been too 
far from Roger's last transmission. They'd had a close look at this part of 
N'urth on the way in, and saw no sign of him.
    "You know what it feels like to me," Kathy said as Hiro did a quick 
diagnostic to make sure everything on the shuttle was as it should have been 
after the landing, "it feels like Earth in our time, but with no human 
habitation. But most of the other life-like the trees and birds we spotted-seems 
pretty much the same. Strange, since a lot of that life was the result of human 
habitation back on Earth."
    "Earth with no industry," Jack said. "Maybe there is human habitation, but 
not so out of balance as to scar the land. Like Iroquois New York in, say, 
fifteen hundred."
    "No," Kathy said. "The trees look like-I don't know-like they were planted. 
In large numbers. Like in the New Millennium Renewals. Trees in the wild nave a 
much more straggly, closer-together look."
    "Look, Momma-those flowers are beautiful." Noah pointed through the 
real-view window to a purple patch of what looked like mountain laurel. They 
were beautiful indeed, Aaron agreed.
    "Your boyhood dream of a Bronx before apartment buildings and the El come 
true here, eh, Jack?" Aaron said.
    "Again not likely," Kathy said. "See that stand over there?" She pointed to 
another part of the scene outside. "Those trees look like those 2009 imports 
from New Zealand."
    "Sometimes dreams come partially true," Jack said.
    Would be nice if yours about Wise Oak had, Aaron thought. But he didn't say 
it. He knew Jack was feeling the pressure-his own internal pressure, far worse 
than anything anyone else could dish out- about his river that flowed both ways 
flowing just one way so far, just as Aaron was beating himself up about the 
boomerang theory that he'd never been sure would work in the first place.
    But he also understood that Jack wouldn't have minded being taken off the 
hook for the return trip, wouldn't have minded settling for a good place for all 
of them to live, here on N'urth. At this point, what they saw through the window 
indicated that they were off to a pretty good start-all the greens and blues and 
earth tones, all the colors f home. So fine a morning, so welcoming an awning...
    "OK, you're all set to go out and explore," Hiro said. "The oxygen and other 
factors test out just as we'd expected-lots of good clean fresh air for you. And 
I sent an e-mail back to Nikki letting her know that we landed OK, and reminding 
her not to leave the miso-"
    "I'm sure it's under control." Kathy laughed. "Let's get outside and look 
around."
    Her laugh was a tonic for everyone's nerves. Now they all looked at Aaron. 
"Well, yes, let's go outside. That's what we're here for, isn't it?"
    He moved to pick up his chamelocase, a svelte little product of Amish neural 
ergonomics that always felt as if it weighed three ounces, regardless of the 
real weight that it actually carried. The philosophic consequences of that were 
too heavy for even him to consider. He just loved what it did for his arm.
    "Uncle Aaron?" Noah asked. "Can I take along my pail and shovel?"
    "Sure-just don't build any apartment buildings." Aaron winked at Jack and 
picked the boy up and sat him down on a chair, where they struggled to put on 
his hiking boots. Putting on little kids' boots was for some reason one of the 
most difficult things in the world, apparently, wherever that world was located.
    They were ready to open the hatch about ten minutes later. Hiro did a final 
set of readings. Everything looked good. He would stay in the shuttle, in 
constant contact with Kathy, Jack, and Aaron-Nikki, too, if necessary.
    Roger was still missing. Everyone knew that, everyone was worried. But 
everyone also felt good.
    Aaron let Noah be the first one out-in Kathy's arms. There was no point in 
trying to convince either of them to stay in the shuttle. Jack and he followed. 
Two guys hugging either side of eighty, Aaron thought-OK, let's say the 
Russell-Shaw factor and gene therapy reduced their effective age to sixty, maybe 
late fifties, but even so-and a four-year-old boy and his mother. Some 
exploration party. A new universe indeed.
    "What were Roger's first words here?" Kathy asked.
    "Lost in garbled transmission," Hiro answered over the com.
    "Why don't you say something," Jack said to Kathy. "Hiro will make sure it's 
recorded."
    Kathy spoke in a quavering voice, unusual for her. "Here, second planet of 
Alpha Centauri A, is the best of what Earth has to offer you. The love and 
wonder of a little child, born on no planet, on a ship from Earth. Consider 
that, please, and not just our science. And don't forget the father of this boy 
who came to you last month. You wouldn't be so crude as to hurt him." And she 
started crying.
    "I love you, Momma," Noah said, and wrapped his arms around her thighs.


    Crunch ... crunch ... they crunched along on what seemed to be a path of 
maples and oaks and the occasional white birch on a high ridge by a river. The 
air had the smell of leaves soon to fall.
    "Bronx Park East," Aaron said.
    Jack nodded.
    They kept walking. They didn't stay in one place long enough to examine any 
flora or fauna. Time for that later.
    Noah wanted to investigate-"Are there wild fish in there, Momma?"-but they 
wanted to get to McLaren's landing site as soon as they could. "I think there 
could be," Aaron said to Noah, "but we'll check that out on the way back, OK?"
    "OK," he said. "This place is great!" He bounded ahead and picked what 
looked like a mauve buttercup-a flower whose color bore no resemblance to any 
buttercup Aaron had ever seen in the Bronx. For some reason, this point of 
discrepancy was a comfort.
    "Remember," Kathy called out, "it's OK to pick but don't put anything in 
your mouth." Noah had gloves on, tied to his sleeve and unremovable.
    Noah laughed. "Why would I do that, Momma?"
    Kathy turned her attention to the environment-taster she held in her palm. 
"The readings are just as they were on the shuttle-Earth-type proportions even 
down to the pollen levels I'm picking up here."
    Jack breathed in. His face looked more lined in the real, yellow sunlight of 
ACA than it had in the ship's simulation of sun, but the lines were deep grooves 
of satisfaction. "This is my Geiger counter," he slapped his chest and said. "It 
tells me everything around here is good."
    "Maybe too good," Aaron said, unable to resist giving voice to that qualm 
now.
    "I was thinking the same thing," Kathy said. "What are the odds that this 
planet would be so like Earth, and in so short a time? I mean, we knew we'd find 
something like this-we know how the planet's changed in the past few weeks-but 
seeing this with our own eyes, actually walking around here, it seems 
unbelievable."
    "Well, we seem to be seeing a metamorphosis here, not evolution," Aaron 
said, "where the end point in all its detail is already determined-to be just 
like Earth. But even so, I don't see how a transformation into something more 
like Earth, if that's what's going on here, could possibly result in such 
specificity of species. Unless the original material that's being acted on-the 
original planet-has properties we don't know about. Who knows, maybe this is how 
organic forms develop in this neck of the cosmos. Maybe there's less variety in 
DNA than we thought. Maybe matter just evolves faster here."
    "Dreams are like that," Jack said.
    "Like what, Uncle Jack?" Noah asked.
    "Dreams can bring whole worlds into being in the wink of an eye," Jack said.
    "Are you scared of dreams?" Noah asked. "You sound a little scared."
    "Well, I guess I am a little," Jack said, and put his hand on Noah's 
shoulder.
    "But I thought you love dreams," Noah persisted.
    "Depends on whose they are," Jack replied. "I think we could live very well 
in yours."
    "How much longer to McLaren's site?" Aaron asked Kathy.
    She looked at her taster. "Damn," she said.
    "What?"
    She punched some numbers in and looked around. "We just passed it. I just 
confirmed with Hiro."
    They all looked back over the steps they'd taken. The only places where even 
so much as a blade of grass was bent were the spots on which they'd trodden.


    Aaron called Hiro. "You sure about this?"
    "I just checked again with Nikki," he answered. "Her readings are pinpoint 
specific. No doubt about where McLaren's site was."
    Aaron shook his head in disbelief. "No wonder we couldn't find a trace of 
him from the ship." He gestured to Jack and Kathy to come closer. Noah was 
scrutinizing some brown seedpods.
    "OK," Aaron said quietly, "we're going to stick our faces into every pebble 
and piece of moss near McLaren's site and see if we can find some sign of what 
happened to him. The instruments register nothing, but they're not infallible. 
And, Hiro-please keep an eye on us and make sure we don't disappear too."
    Now how's he gonna do that? Aaron could hear his conscience impersonating 
Nikki's voice in his ear.
    Kathy pulled Noah away from the seedpods. They walked the fifty feet or so 
to the exact place where McLaren's craft was supposed to have landed.
    "Does the grass around here look a little newer?" Kathy asked. "I don't 
know, a sort of softer green?"
    "Wishful thinking." Jack looked around and up at the sky. "More likely due 
to a shade differential. Is that Alpha Centauri B over there?" He pointed to a 
bright orange star near the horizon.
    "I believe it is," Aaron said. "Looks almost like the taillight of a plane." 
He contemplated the orange star a little longer. Then he got down on his hands 
and knees and began crawling around, eyes an inch or two above the ground. Kathy 
and Jack did the same. "Noah, you can help too," Kathy said, "but look just with 
your eyes and let us know if you see anything that seems like it doesn't belong 
here. But just tell us-don't touch it." She leaned over to Aaron and spoke in 
his ear. "I don't want him gashing his finger on some jagged piece of rubble 
from Roger's shuttle that cuts through his glove-if that, God forbid, is all 
that's left of it here."
    Aaron nodded. "Not likely the instruments would've missed something like 
that, though," he whispered. He took no satisfaction at all in realizing that 
Kathy's optimism about Roger was no longer what it had been on the Light 
Through.
    "OK," Noah said, already half turned to the ground. Aaron caught a graveness 
in Noah's expression that made him think the boy had picked up on their 
desperation despite their attempts to hide it. Noah also looked older here than 
he did on the ship.
    Each of them concentrated on a different part of the little clearing.
    Kathy was on her belly, snakelike, examining the soil and flora with her 
eyes and a variety of tiny infrared and other optical equipment. "Beautiful, 
beautiful," she said from time to time.
    Jack was on his back, running his fingers along the underside of shrubbery 
branches. "Soft as a newborn's skin," he said.
    Aaron had his nose to the ground. The loamy smell was intoxicating. "This 
doesn't seem like any kind of illusion, certainly not digital," he said to no 
one in particular. "The detail at these close quarters on every sensory level is 
too real-trees and sunshine and broad strokes like that are one thing, they're 
easy to paint, but I'm seeing old-fashioned little wormholes and fungi here."
    Only Noah reacted. "Wormholes make me laugh," he said, and he laughed.
    Aaron had an odd feeling that each of them was a bit too far away from the 
others. Noah was closest to him, stroking a big smooth quartz-like stone, trying 
to get a sense of its texture through his glove. So much for Kathy's injunction. 
But even Noah seemed distant-Aaron thought he should tell Noah to stay closer, 
to stop touching... but the earth that was near Aaron's mouth and nose and eyes 
was much more real to him. It was inside his lungs, his body. Soothing him, 
warming him, healing ...
    "Uncle Aaron," a tiny voice said. "I think I found something..."
    Whose voice was that? What does it want from me? Aaron wanted to merge with 
the earth, every itch in every cell of his being caressed and intermingled with 
it-
    "Uncle Aaron-"
    What?
    Something cold-fingers-touched his neck.
    He forced his eyes open. Noah.
    "Uncle Aaron ..."
    Aaron looked up at Noah, and the sky above. He felt woozy. The sky looked 
off yellow, like a dream thrown up, turned inside out. Aaron pulled the com to 
his mouth with great effort and called Hiro. His tongue moved like fast-drying 
concrete. "Are we OK? Are we still here?"
    "Of course you are," Hiro said. "Why?"
    "We're coming back," Aaron said, and got to his feet. "Let's go," he said 
loudly. Neither Jack nor Kathy moved. Noah took his hand.
    "Uncle Aaron-"
    "You go over and, ah, wake up Uncle Jack, OK? I'll see what's doing with 
Momma."
    He walked quickly over to Kathy and touched her shoulder. She turned over. 
Her eyes were open, and she looked at him, but her pupils were dilated as if she 
were stone drunk or deep in sleep. If he'd been the physician, not she, perhaps 
he'd have had a better guess of what she was seeing through those floating eyes.
    "Kathy," Aaron said, "come on; we're going back to the shuttle." Her pupils 
shrank back into focus. "Beautiful things down there," she said slowly, and 
reluctantly shook off some internal pleasure.
    Jack was on his feet, about as unsteady as Aaron felt. "What just happened?" 
he said. "We didn't find any trace of McLaren?"
    "I don't think so," Aaron replied. "Let's get back to the shuttle and sort 
it out."
    Kathy put her arms around Noah and gave him a kiss. "Let's go," she said.
    "OK," Noah said. "But I think I found-"
    "Right," Aaron said. "You were trying to tell me that before, weren't you?"
    Noah nodded, looked embarrassed.
    "What's the matter, honey?" Kathy said.
    "I touched it," he said guiltily. "And I put it in my pocket because I 
didn't want to lose it."
    "That's OK," Aaron said. "Can we see it?"
    "Sure," Noah said, relieved that he apparently hadn't done anything too 
wrong. He pulled a thin gray rock out of his shirt pocket, flat as a silver 
dollar. "This looked different," he said. "It wasn't like the other rocks I 
saw."
    And indeed it wasn't. It was a camouflaged data disk, with McLaren's 
personal hologram signature affixed.


    The hike back to the shuttle was uneventful-or rather, they were so focused 
on the disk that they barely noticed their surroundings. A soft, misty rain 
began to fall. It had an appealing pineapple scent.
    Aaron clutched the disk in his pocket. It was well beyond being waterproof. 
It was total-environment proof-a classic ecodesign that mimicked an 
insignificant natural object, a rock, and thus made it resistant to natural and 
untutored human interference alike, as well as invisible to even the most 
sophisticated scanning. This in turn made it nondisruptive to any 
pre-computer-literate society that might accidentally find it, and untraceable 
by any advanced society that might want to find it-the perfect memopad for an 
ecocop obliged to steer clear of both the last Stone Age tribes that still lived 
along the Amazon and the high-tech infomatiques from the local 
government/rancher combos that hunted them down. McLaren had cut his teeth on 
these disks, and he continued to use them like Aaron's father had clung to his 
fountain pen. That, and McLaren's desire that no intelligence other than theirs 
read this disk, had likely led him to use this medium.
    Jack caught Aaron's eye. " 'Better for the Borneo man to find a Carpenter 
disk than a Coke can,' right?" Jack intoned the ad that appeared on millions of 
scholarly computer screens, referring to the people whose collision with Western 
artifacts Edmund Carpenter had studied in the 1970s, and who long since had gone 
on to make computers themselves in the outpouring of electronics from all points 
Far East.
    Kathy made five copies of the disk and telecommed its data to Nikki as soon 
as they got back in the shuttle. Nikki had to have a copy in case the shuttle 
somehow blew up or disappeared before they had a chance to look at the disk and 
communicate with her. She would keep the telecommed data in quarantine until 
their programs certified it free from viruses. Of course, the data could have a 
virus undetectable by any of the programs on the shuttle or the starship. 
Certainty of virus protection was an impossibility even back on Earth.
    What could be the source of a computer virus way out here? Aaron had no 
idea. He'd often thought that the twenty-first century suffered from 
computer-virus paranoia. But better safe than sorry-or, at least, a little 
safer-when it came to the Light Through's, computer system. They'd all be dead 
without it.
    Hiro called the disk directory up on their biggest screen. It showed nothing 
on the disk except a paltry 3.37 K of ASCII data. "Run the virus programs 
again," Aaron said. "Viruses have been known to cloak data." The programs 
checked not only for viruses but all kinds of hidden data. They came up clean.
    "It looks like just the three K of text," Kathy said.
    "OK," Aaron said. "Let's see what Roger wanted to say to us."
    Kathy called the text up on the screen.
    

    First, apologies for this text rather than a full audiovisual report. I 
didn't have the time. I plan to leave thousands of these scattered around the 
planet-a lot near my landing site. If you're reading this, my plan worked. If 
not-well, no point talking about that, because then you won't be reading this.
    Here are the highlights:
    1.  I know I haven't been able to communicate with you since you turned the 
star. Obviously this has something to do with this planet, which I'll get into 
in a bit more detail below.
    2.   I've been able to keep in good scan-touch with you throughout, though. 
I saw you had a pretty close call with ACA-Nikki and Bo, cutting it a bit close, 
weren't you? I also see you're barely moving now that you've made the 
turnaround. Well, at least you're alive.
    3.  Back to N'urth and its strange properties-I hope you like the name. As 
best as I can tell, the planet's in its last stages of becoming more like Earth. 
I think it's sort of working like a rewinding tape-you know, the closer it gets 
back to the beginning, the faster it moves. Anyway, the storm phase is what 
finally confounded my telemetry, and kept me stuck here, as you likely guessed. 
But then I had a little brainstorm: If I was right that N'urth was transforming 
more and more rapidly to be like Earth, and I could estimate the rate of 
change-the acceleration-then maybe I could program my telemetry to accurately 
reflect what the specs of this planet would be like tomorrow.
    4.  That's in fact what I did yesterday, and the specs so far look like 
they'll be right on key today. Probably my recalibration-which made my 
instrumentation totally out of synch with what was going on here on the planet 
even yesterday-made me even more incommunicado. In any case, I still can't 
communicate with you. But the good news is that the specs look like they'll be 
better than ever today. And the storms are over too. If everything stays that 
way, I'll be able to leave altogether.
    5.  Now, sir, if you're reading this, don't start shouting, but if I'm able 
to lift off this planet I'm going to check out the hulk with my own eyes. I can 
hear all your good reasons against that, and that's why I'm not going to even 
try to communicate with you about this beforehand. Let's face it: the hulk may 
be our last chance to get some fuel to return home. Someone's got to inspect it 
close at hand. I'm here, I have a shuttle, I've got to be the one to do this. 
I'll be in touch with the Light Through as soon as I leave the hulk, assuming I 
can communicate then. With any luck, I'll be back on the Light Through shortly 
after with a full report.
    6.  One last thing-for those of you who may be reading this on N'urth now: 
The planet's obviously unstable. It looks like I was right about the planet's 
weather today, but who knows about later. I can't even be sure that looking like 
Earth is the end point of its transformation. The gist is: It may or may not be 
suitable for us to live on. We can discuss that when I get back to the ship. But 
I'd advise any of you on the planet, now that you've read this, to get off as 
soon as possible. This world seems to, I don't know, grow on you-maybe 
literally-and until we understand that better, I think we're better off staying 
away.
    -R. McLaren
    P.S. Oh, yeah: Give Noah a big hug for me.
    

    Noah had a huge smile on his face. He'd read and likely understood most of 
Roger's note. Aaron scooped him up.
    "Are we going to go to the hulk now to see Roger?" Noah asked. "No," Aaron 
said. "We're going back to our big ship."
    "Incoming call from Nikki," Hiro said, ear to his com. "She's heard from 
Roger! He's OK!"
    "On his way back from the hulk?" Kathy asked, taking Noah and kissing his 
face. The joy in her voice was like a bell ringing.
    "I... just a minute," Hiro said, scrunching his face in concentration. He 
pulled his com away and hurried over to the console. His fingers rushed over the 
keys like a millipede's legs.
    "What's happening?" Aaron asked.
    Hiro finally looked at him. His shook his head like a surgeon who'd just 
lost a patient.
    "Our telecom's down," he said. "Completely gone."











Eight


    "Telemetry?" Aaron asked.
    "No good also," Hiro said. "Same basic problem as telecom. We're not only 
dumb, we're deaf and blind."
    Aaron was on his feet, pacing. "So tell me why we just can't take off and 
fly out of here with no telemetry? Many's the time I crept along in my car on 
fogged-in roads in Pennsylvania-so thick I couldn't see an inch past my 
windshield-and here I am telling you about it."
    "That was before computers," Hiro said. "You weren't driving with no 
telemetry then-your brain was on-line. And you were able to make tiny 
adjustments in your speed and steering as you went along, based on all your 
previous experience as a driver. Here, our shuttle isn't really guided in flight 
by our brains-it gets its guidance from its net, and its store of previous 
patterns. Far too much information for our human brains to handle. But when the 
patterns in the stored net are too much at variance with what telemetry sees out 
there-when there's too much of a conflict for a match of any kind-the system 
shuts down. We could override it and take off anyway, of course, but that would 
be crazy in these circumstances. We'd have no way to control the shuttle; it'd 
be a miracle if we even made it through the atmosphere."
    "Finicky system," Jack said.
    "No, not finicky," Hiro said. "This isn't just a new weather pattern or 
cloud formation out there. The net would probably be able to handle hat. It's 
almost a new planet-even the ground is giving different readings from when we 
arrived. Too much for any net to process."
    "That's what we were feeling out there," Kathy said. "The ground was alive." 
She closed her eyes and breathed in deeply.
    "Any way you can take a stab at anticipating the changes in N'urth, like 
Roger did?" Aaron asked.
    "I can try," Hiro said. "But Roger's ingenious guess was that N'urth was 
becoming more like Earth. And he knew what that was like, knew its general 
patterns. But now this planet seems to be moving beyond Earth-post-Earth-it's 
like Earth jumping over the Industrial Revolution. Who could know where that 
will end?"
    "I have an idea," Jack said.
    He had everyone's rapt attention.
    "A few years ago-actually, a few years before I joined you on Mars 
Vestibule-I was involved in an interesting modeling project at Columbia 
University. The idea was to create a simulation of what our world would have 
looked like in 2015 if we could erase all negative traces of the Industrial Age. 
I convinced them that North America, circa 1500-one of my favorite years, as you 
all know-would be a good baseline. We researched and projected lots of very 
explicit details on the climate, weather patterns-"
    "We were doing that in my room last month, right?" Noah spoke up. He'd been 
brooding in a corner for most of this.
    "Right," Jack said, "and you can help me with this now. Let's see if we can 
program the 2015 no-industry model into the shuttle net- maybe it'll be enough 
of a match for what's now really out there for us to leave the planet. I've had 
a feeling I've been walking in some kind of post-industrial version of Wise 
Oak's world ever since we got here."
    "There's got to be some sort of deeper explanation for that," Aaron mused. 
"Can't be just coincidence ..."
    "Let's worry about that later, and see if we can use that model to get out 
of here now," Hiro said. He joined Jack and Noah-a master computer chef and his 
two assistants-and the three started working the keyboards.
    Kathy put her head on Aaron's shoulder. "At least Roger's OK," she said 
after a while.
    They took a food break about two hours later. "We have a fifty-eight percent 
match to what is out there now," Hiro said. "A lot better than zero, but still 
very risky."
    "I'm drained," Jack said. He looked exhausted.
    "You did a wonderful job." Aaron reached out and put his hand over Jack's. 
"All of you. What are our options now?"
    "We can keep refining the programming," Hiro said. "But the planet's still 
in flux. We may get lucky and be at sixty-eight percent tomorrow, or the bottom 
could fall out and we could plummet back down again to no match."
    "The problem is that our Columbia model tried to leave in place some good 
natural consequences of the industrial era-like trees transplanted from faraway 
places-and since there apparently was no actual industrial era on N'urth, it's 
hard to take those factors into account as we try to educate our net here," Jack 
said.
    "All right," Aaron said. "I say we try to leave-right now."
    He looked around the table. Noah was dozing in Kathy's lap. She shook her 
head yes. Jack and Hiro nodded also.


    The shuttle took off.
    It shook like a leaf in a lightning storm.
    But it held its course and cleared the planet.
    Everyone settled into a few hours of desperately needed sleep, and Aaron 
thought: So why the hell would N'urth be transforming itself into a 
post-industrial New York?
    And if the planet proved ultimately unsuitable for their habitation, they'd 
still need to get back to Sol and Earth.
    How?
    Maybe McLaren would know....


    "Patch her through to me," Aaron said. "No, put her on groupcom so everyone 
can hear." No point, anymore, trying to keep information from Noah.
    A hash of pinging garble filled the cabin, like popcorn in a microwave gone 
wrong.
    "Something off with the telecom again?" Aaron asked. They were ell away from 
N'urth and any influence it could have, a few hours from rendezvous with the 
Light Through.
    Hiro shook his head. "No-sounds like sun static interference. Maybe 
augmented by Proxima's flares. I'll have it clear in a moment."
    "Aaron, how are you, all of you?" Nikki's voice came through, crackling but 
comprehensible.
    "We're fine," Aaron said. "Had a few rounds of aggravation on the planet, 
par for the course, but we're OK now. I'll fill you in when we get back. How's 
McLaren?"
    "He seems to be OK," Nikki said. "We've been out of contact with him for the 
past thirty hours-horrible sun static out there."
    "Yeah, we know," Aaron said. "But Hiro said you heard from him. He's not 
back on the Light Through yet?"
    "No, not yet," Nikki said. "His bioreadings seemed OK, best as we can tell 
at this distance. We got just one strange line of text from him-no voice. It may 
have been garbled in the static too."
    "What was it?"
    "'To understand this tyop, change the arrangement of its letters.' "
    Noah laughed. "It's a joke," he said. "He's tied up."
    "I'm not sure we got that," Aaron said. "Could you send it through in print 
on the screen?"
    The screen glowed: "To understand this tyop, change the arrangement of its 
letters."
    Hiro studied the display. "Could a 'tyop' be some sort of particle Roger 
discovered there? Some subatomic something-like a tachyon- that changes when we 
try to observe it?"
    "Possibly," Kathy said. "More likely some kind of garbling, with the rest of 
his message cut off. You got nothing more from Roger?"
    "No," Nikki said. "We lost contact right after that. Medscan data showed a 
ninety-three percent match with the last readings on him from the planet-that's 
well within the normal range. His shuttle was operating as it should, about 
halfway on a vector between the hulk and us. I'd expect him back here in about 
two days."
    Jack was thinking about something else, shaking his head. "Not likely to be 
noise," he said. "The rest of the message says to change the arrangement of the 
letters. So McLaren was deliberately pointing to the first part of the message, 
and telling us that to understand it, we have to change it. That's deliberate 
information, not noise."
    "So let's change it," Aaron said.
    "Well, tyop is the obvious word to change," Kathy said. "There aren't many 
words that begin with ty-"
    "Typo" Jack said. "Typo does."
    Kathy leaned over and typed onto the screen, "To understand this typo, 
change the arrangement of its letters." She relayed it to Nikki.
    "Excellent!" Hiro said. "But-"
    "Precisely," Jack said. "We seem to have made progress, but we're no better 
off than we were before."
    "The story of this whole goddamned mission," Aaron said.
    "Why would Roger send such a peculiar message?" Kathy asked.
    "Maybe his commentary on our mission, indeed," Jack said.
    "No," Aaron said. "Not Roger's style. More likely he was trying to tell us 
something ... about the hulk ... or about our whole predicament."
    "Like: 'Don't try too hard to unravel the mysteries, for you'll get 
nowhere'?" Kathy asked. "What then? We just let ourselves be carried along?"
    "Roger's phrase sounds familiar," Nikki said, "like something I read years 
ago in one of Hofstadter's books-he called them self-effacing emergent 
propositions, or something like that."
    "Meta Magical Themas," Noah said.
    "What?" Kathy and Aaron asked.
    "That's what the book is named," Noah said. "I screened through it in the 
library. I thought it had fairy tales."
    "You sure you're four, and not really forty?" Hiro shook Noah's small hand 
in amazement.
    "Noah's right," Nikki said. "The proposition deteriorates into 
meaninglessness even as it briefly sticks its head above its initial 
incomprehensibility. Our understanding gives it life and final death at the same 
time. That's why it's self-effacing-sort of like, I don't know, a male spider 
dying in the very reproductive act."
    "Charming," Aaron said.
    "But that still doesn't explain why Roger would communicate something like 
that," Kathy said.
    "He was making a joke," Noah said again.
    "Something may have impaired his ability to communicate," Jack said.
    "How so?" Kathy asked.
    "Well," Jack said, "I remember reading something once about a new kind of 
high-level autism that's been identified, in which people speak in short, 
riddlelike statements. The upshot was the Delphi Oracles and all may have been 
autistic-that sometimes people see so much, have so much to say, that their 
pathways become overloaded and all they can produce are cryptic little 
statements."
    "But the statements have meaning?" Aaron asked.
    "Yeah, they do. Lots of meaning, too much meaning, that's the point," Jack 
said. "But sometimes even the context is so far beyond everyone else that no one 
is able to understand them."
    "And McLaren got that way from what? His visit to the hulk?" Aaron asked. 
And he thought: or who knows, maybe a delayed effect of his time on N'urth.
    "Well, it's a strange star system," Jack said.
    "Well, it is," Aaron agreed. "But we're running way ahead of ourselves here. 
All we've got so far is likely a fragment of a longer, normal message from 
McLaren that got cut off in transmission."
    "Just a theory," Jack said. "Just an idea to scratch that linguistic 
mosquito bite."
    "It does itch," Kathy mused. "His first message, the one he left us on the 
planet, was so clear...."
    "How long before we're back on the big ship?" Aaron asked Hiro and Nikki.


    The docking felt good. Being back on the Light Through felt good. Aaron 
marveled that he felt more at home on a small starship of biospheric engineering 
than a planet that reminded him of Bronx Park East in May. Something not right 
about that. Or maybe the inside of this ship was after all more like the 
apartments he'd spent more time inhabiting than anyplace else in the Bronx.
    The resemblance of N'urth to Bronx Park-down to the subtle nuances of color 
and leaf form-was stunning. Was it real or in his mind? The question, of course, 
was wrong. External reality and mental projection were ever inextricable. People 
see the world-organisms take in reality-only via the colors and shapes and forms 
that their senses allow them to perceive and their brains can process. To a 
color-blind person, Bronx Park and N'urth both would be shades of gray....
    Nikki and Aviva and even Bo greeted the returnees with joy. Noah scampered 
up and down into everyone's arms.
    "Nothing more from McLaren," Nikki said.
    Aaron nodded and looked at her. He'd just been talking with her on the com a 
few minutes earlier, and he got that odd feeling he used to get sometimes when 
he'd drive up to the house of someone he was talking to on the cell phone: the 
sense of a voice suddenly snapping into a full flesh-and-blood personage-the 
representation, the communication, instantly imploding back into its point of 
origin.
    "We need to talk," Nikki said to Aaron, out of the others' earshot. It was 
clear that she wanted a private conversation.
    Aaron advised everyone else to get some sleep, and he walked off with Nikki.


    "This is about McLaren?" he asked as they walked toward her office. "He's 
been out of touch a long time for just sun static, even with flares from 
Proxima."
    "No, not McLaren," Nikki said. "We're getting through to him now on audio 
and text, but he isn't responding. Probably just a little something out of key 
with his transmitter. But he should be back here in a few hours anyway."
    "Good." Aaron sighed with relief. "So what then?" "Well, it's about our QM 
explanation about the strange developments," Nikki said. "That oxygen and 
hydrogen display around ACA before we got here-and now what's happened on 
N'urth, maybe even why we almost got pulled into ACA."
    "Ah, yes," Aaron said. "And Noah was the reason you didn't want to say 
anything about this in front of everyone, or even on the com to me, where it 
could have been accidentally heard by someone else?" "Yeah," Nikki said. "I 
didn't want Noah to hear-or Kathy." They reached her office. Nikki pressed in 
the entry code, and pointed Aaron to a comfortable chair by a circular table.


    "Tea, Aaron?"
    He nodded. Nikki slipped a cup of hot, shimmering liquid over o him along 
with the sheerscreen. The room temperature was perfect, but he felt chilled and 
tired and was glad for the fragrant tea steam in his face.
    He sipped and read.
    "Kathy and I pretty much worked all this out before our little slow dance 
with the sun," Nikki advised quietly, like a voiceover commentator. "But I put 
the finishing touches on-a few relationships splashed into place-while you were 
down on the planet."
    "I see."
    "The bell curve is about as clean as I've seen," Nikki said. An icon in the 
form of an ochre-painted fingernail traced the line on Aaron's screen. "It came 
into focus as soon as I realized we were dealing not with a group but an 
individual causative agent here-and one for which we had no background stats in 
any of our records, no baseline figures from Earth for comparisons. That's what 
made his patterns so hard to identify at first."
    "Hard to believe," Aaron said, but it was indeed all there. "You know, I 
never cared much for subjective QM even on its well-established subatomic 
level-"
    "We know," Nikki said.
    "-but, OK, physicists want to say that two particles collide like billiard 
balls, travel away from each other to great distances, and you examine one and 
it affects the spin or momentum or whatever of the other-this offends my sense 
of rationality to the bone as a philosopher-but, OK, if it makes the physicists 
happy, if they've got the equations and the evidence, I still think there's 
likely some sort of other hidden-variable explanation, maybe some sort of 
faster-than-light signaling, but, OK, I'm willing to play with mind over matter 
and mysterious quantum fields of influence at that level. But on our life-size 
level? On even bigger levels? How? How can what we want of the universe possibly 
make it happen that way? How can a child's desires create hydrogen and oxygen 
out of nothing-turn a Mars-like planet into something that feels like Earth?"
    "I don't know," Nikki said. "Maybe part of the answer is that the rules of 
cause and effect, of mind and matter, are somehow different in this part of the 
universe. Maybe our approach to ACA at half-C, our slowdown, our being caught 
between the lingering gravitation of Sol from behind and the burgeoning ACA in 
front, maybe this accordion somehow acted as an amplifier to QM forces that back 
near Sol operate only on subatomic levels."
    "How?"
    "I don't speak how, Aaron," Nikki said. "All I know with confidence is the 
data. Look." She caused more fingernails to light up on his screen display. 
"Here."
    An icon pointed at the appearance and disappearance of the hydrogen and 
oxygen.
    "Here again."
    Aaron saw the blossoming of N'urth.
    "And watch here."
    Before Aaron's eyes was the Light Through's near-collision with ACA, a vivid 
virtual rendition.
    He began to perspire.
    All of this correlated far too well for coincidence with Noah's wishes, 
confided to Kathy, Aviva, him, everyone on the ship, expertly gleaned from days 
of interviews by Nikki, and set out in a "wish" graph that accompanied each of 
the renditions on the screen. Extremely convincing.
    "But Noah didn't want us to crash into the star," Aaron said.
    "No, of course not," Nikki said. "I think he just didn't want us to whip 
around the star as we'd planned and go on our way back home. He was afraid we'd 
leave McLaren behind. He wanted to see the new planet. He's a four-year-old, for 
God's sake. He just wanted what he wanted and had no idea what the consequences 
would be."
    "He picked up our concern that N'urth wasn't enough like Earth to support us 
if we had to stay there," Aaron said, "so he, what, somehow stimulated the 
planet to grow into the Earth he knew-parks and sanctuaries on his viewscreens, 
stories from Jack about the Iroquois, a make-believe purple flower or two thrown 
in for good measure, as any little kid would do? Difficult to believe that a 
single brain could have such sway over matter."
    "It shows maybe we don't know enough about the matter out there," Nikki 
said. "Or not enough about that single brain."
    Aaron gulped the last of his tea, lukewarm now. "So Kathy knows most of 
this, some of this...?"
    "I think she knows a lot of it. She'd have to-she's his mother. That's why I 
wanted to talk to you about this first. I mean, she's his other, and she'll 
naturally want to protect him. But we've got to protect the ship in case Noah 
wants something else. In case-"
    "I understand," Aaron said. "I'll talk to Kathy."
    "Good," Nikki said. "I know you're very close to the boy. He's obviously 
extremely intelligent and means us no harm. If maybe you could explain to him 
what's happening here, before something else happens-"
    "You think another transformation is on tap?"
    "Well, he's been talking a lot since he got back about visiting the hulk. 
But so far all the readings are steady."
    The com chimed-call for Aaron, routed from his office. The letters "Ivanoff" 
appeared on the screen.
    Aaron put him on holaround. Ivanoff looked worried.
    "Bo," Aaron said.
    "McLaren's back, a little sooner than expected," said Bo.
    "Wonderful!" Aaron replied.
    "Not so wonderful," Bo said. "He's not talking."
    "Not talking to you?" Aaron asked. "I don't-"
    "Not talking to me, not talking to Hiro, not talking to anyone. Period. The 
man's totally unresponsive."











Nine


    Aaron knocked on Kathy's door the next morning. She let him in, with a weak 
smile.
    Noah was asleep in the other room. An endless loop of Drifters' songs spun 
softly in the background-minor chords, glistening edges, save the last dance for 
Russell-Shaw...
    "I saw something in his face," Kathy said. "He wants to talk to us, but for 
some reason he can't."
    "Jack may be right," Aaron said. "God knows what he encountered on that 
hulk-it may be beyond any human ability to convey."
    "But it's so frustrating," Kathy said, and started to sob. "It's one thing 
to explain his behavior with our theories. But to see him-just sitting 
there-wanting to talk to us but just not able ... It's not fair. All of my 
training, and I can't do a thing to help him."
    Aaron touched her cheek, brushed away a tear with the fleshy part of his 
thumb. The droplet was warm. "It's way too soon for despair," he said. "Roger 
could be fine tomorrow." He took her hand. "He seemed the most responsive to 
Noah."
    "Predictable, based on Jack's theory," Kathy said, breathing in slowly and 
exhaling. "Noah represents the least pressure to Roger, probably because Noah 
couldn't understand what it is that Roger wants to tell us."
    "Whereas all the rest of us presumably could?"
    "I don't know," Kathy said. She squeezed his hand. Something hanged in her 
expression. "We need to talk about Nikki's equations, don't we?"
    "Well, yes, I would have last night, but with Roger in the shape he's in-"
    "And you feel uncomfortable talking to me about my son, because he is, after 
all, my son, and my mother's feelings might get in the way of what's best for 
all the other people on this ship," Kathy said.
    "It's not like that," Aaron said.
    "What's it like, then? Tell me," Kathy said.
    Aaron looked at her. "Very complicated," he said. "First, I'm still not sure 
I completely buy Nikki's theory. I'm an old-fashioned cause-and-effect 
chauvinist-I think it takes physical energy and materials to move mountains, not 
just minds-and I find it hard to swallow that Noah's mind did all this. Maybe 
there was something else in the brew that Nikki's correlations overlooked. But, 
second, if Noah did do it, I wouldn't say at all it's something we need to be 
afraid of-maybe just the opposite. We're very low on fuel now. With N'urth so 
unstable, we're running out of options. I'd hoped the hulk might give us 
something, but McLaren's condition is hardly a good portent for that. If Noah's 
mind does have some power over physical reality, maybe we can use it for our 
benefit."
    Kathy shook her head and smiled again, in a rueful way that hurt Aaron's 
eyes. "I think that Noah's lost any special ability he might have had."
    Aaron looked at her. He thought about putting his arm around her, giving her 
consolation. But for what, exactly?
    "Can we start at the beginning?" he said softly, at last.
    "Oh, Aaron," she said, "there are so many things about me and Noah you don't 
know. I wanted to tell you...."
    "It's OK," he said. "We're all entitled to what little privacy we can find 
in this fishbowl."
    "They're the things you realize, think you realize, in the middle of the 
night," Kathy said. "Then the next morning you're awake, you go about your 
business, and you're not sure. Maybe I was imagining it... maybe I was crazy. I 
didn't want you to think I was crazy."
    "No chance of that. No chance."
    "But now I'm sure of what I was feeling. I know it was real," Kathy said.
    "It's OK," Aaron said.
    "He's an extraordinary child," Kathy said, beaming as if she were talking to 
herself rather than to Aaron. "I knew, I think, long before he was actually 
born. I could feel the presence of his mind inside mine-like an urge, a 
wonderful urge I had to follow. Not to really do anything-but, I guess, to think 
of things. And it was... intensely pleasurable."
    "What things?" Aaron asked as gently as he could.
    "Cosmic things, good things, really hard to describe. When I felt in touch 
with him like that, I felt that somehow all was in synch in the universe. Those 
words are too sweet-not sweet enough, I don't know-the feeling can't be 
described by words. Words make it too brittle."
    "And after he was born?"
    "The urges became more specified. Nursing was unbelievable, like nothing I'd 
ever read about. The milk would start to flow before we were in the same room. 
And I'd know for sure that that's exactly what he wanted. And the feeling of 
feeding him, of nurturing him-of knowing that what my body was producing was 
still giving him his energy, his life-was, again, beyond description. Because I 
could feel not only my own pleasure, but his too-and the whole thing was 
exponential. And it changed me. I've felt closer to the cosmos since then. More 
open to it."
    "And the later effects-on the star and the planet-were like Nikki said?" 
Aaron asked.
    "Yes and no," Kathy said. Her eyes were closed now, as if she were reading a 
screen on the inside of her lids. "He never really created anything out of thin 
air. It was more like he selected-magnified- forces and systems already in 
place. He pulled processes into prominence on the star and the planet-processes 
already there. Like my nursing-I don't think he would've been able to get any 
milk from you." She opened her eyes. "I didn't fully understand it. I still 
don't. You saw some of it, like the way he made me feel that the best thing was 
to take him down to N'urth. I could see in your eyes then, when we were 
discussing it right here, that you understood something was going on."
    Aaron nodded slowly and thought for a few moments. "Convincing you to feel a 
certain way is not the same as changing a climate."
    "To him they were," Kathy said. "Thoughts and matter were both in his grasp, 
equally manipulable by his mind. From what I know of physics, it's not so 
impossible. Just quantum mechanics writ large out here."
    Aaron considered. "Why do you think his powers are gone now?" "I felt it 
down on N'urth," Kathy said. "I felt Noah's need to stay there-that's what he 
wanted, as much as he'd wanted us to have fuel when the oxygen and hydrogen 
appeared; as much as he'd wanted us not to get lost when they combined into 
steam and we saw we were on course to ACA after all; as much as he'd wanted all 
the other things. That's why he wasn't affected by what we all felt down there. 
He was the source. But he changed down there. Something about N'urth-not finding 
Roger there, I don't know-made Noah get a little older. Or maybe he'd have 
outgrown his power wherever he was. But Noah is different now. More articulate, 
less inchoate. He's gone from wanting and creating to understanding."
    Aaron exhaled slowly. "Hard to believe any kid could have such power. Hard 
to believe anyone could. And yet I hate to think that it's gone." Here they were 
floating eight years away from home with maybe a month's worth of fuel at most. 
No damn breaks on this trip. A possible avenue that he'd thought impossible to 
begin with now closed up ahead because its Peter Pan grid had decayed from old 
age. At age four.
    Kathy was crying.
    Aaron put his arms around her and held her close.


    Acker Bilk's "Stranger on the Shore" was playing in McLaren's room. Kathy 
said she'd tried more than two hundred recordings in the past few days, and 
McLaren was the most responsive with this in the background. She thought maybe 
this was because "Stranger on the Shore" had been playing the night Noah was 
conceived.
    The reedy music reminded Aaron of the JFK assassination and a girl with no 
name and the best tight skirt he'd ever seen. But the dance was ending and she 
was too far away, on the other side of the room. And Bilk's clarinet breathed 
on.
    Aaron was too far away to get to Roger now too. He'd talked to him so many 
times since he'd returned, always with the same null result.
    "I know how hard it must be for you," Aaron said. "If you could just meet us 
a little way, just give us a clue of what we need to do to... free you."
    Roger slumped down in his chair. Aaron saw tears in his eyes.
    "This has to do with that ship out there, right?" Aaron pointed toward a 
viewscreen, darkened now. He had no idea if the hulk was really out there in 
that direction. "You saw something there; something happened to you."
    McLaren stared at him.
    "Noah may have unusual powers-may have had them," Aaron said. "Kathy and 
Nikki think he somehow set the molecules in motion that made N'urth change so 
fast. I don't know. Maybe his talent also helped him discover the disk you left 
there. We felt so good, all of us, when we read your note. Your first note. And 
now you're so close to us again-I just wish you could be a little closer."
    "No," McLaren said.
    Aaron nearly jumped out of his shirt, "Great to hear your voice!" But was 
that no or note or Noah?
    Aaron put his hand on Roger's shoulder. "If I ask you questions, is there 
any way you can shake your head or move your eyes to indicate a simple yes or 
no?" Kathy had been through this with him already a dozen times, but he'd just 
uttered a word and Aaron had to try.
    McLaren stared through him.
    "Don't worry; it's OK," Aaron said. "We'll find a way."


    Aaron lay in bed a long time with eyes wide. Above his head was a beautiful 
star chart constructed by Aviva. Sol and Alpha Centauri A sparkled like two 
bright beads at either end of a colorless string, running through the middle of 
a fabric made of cyberspace. Why shouldn't the human race tie together real 
space?
    That's what had motivated this trip....
    He felt a soft wet brush-like a tongue-on his chest.... He must've been 
sleeping. The tongue and the lips drifted slowly up his chest to his mouth, and 
he smelled hair, her hair....
    "Kathy..."
    Her body was on top of his, nipples taut and pressed against his chest and 
shoulder, her thighs over his ... and he was inside her.
    Her mouth was warm and open and her tongue flicked around. His hands slid 
from the nape of her neck down her back.
    He had some vague recollection of a Japanese philosopher who counseled love 
without orgasm as a way of enhancing and sustaining pleasure. But before Aaron 
fully realized what was happening, the good old American way had prevailed....
    Kathy sighed in contentment and nestled her head against his shoulder. "I've 
wanted to do this for a long time," she said.
    "Me too," Aaron said, and ran his fingers along her scalp. "I wasn't sure if 
I was dreaming when we almost fell into the sun."
    "You weren't dreaming," she said dreamily. "Something about you old guys. I 
feel drawn to you."
    "Guys?" he said half jokingly. "Oh, yeah. Jack."
    Kathy tensed a bit and pulled away. "Come on. You've known about Jack."
    "I'm too old to be jealous," he said, "gratitude is the more appropriate 
emotion." But he did wonder whether her attraction to Jack and him might be 
another expression of this QM business. Maybe that's what Noah wanted.... But he 
didn't feel like going down that path now.
    Kathy snuggled. Her eyes fluttered closed on the side of his face.
    "So," he said. "Why tonight?"
    "The time was right tonight," Kathy murmured.
    "Yeah." He kissed her softly and closed his own eyes.
    "The time was right," Kathy said, even more sleepily. "We need another 
baby."


    "You're being foolish. I'm not mad-at you or her," Jack said.
    They were talking on top of Haupt early next evening. Each had a glass of 
clear red wine. Cool stars shone through the real-view window over their 
shoulders, making a light show of the wine and vying with the palms and 
pineapple plants in Hiro's garden for their attention.
    "There's old Sol." Jack motioned with his wineglass to a star shining 
brightly near the Cassiopeia-Perseus border. "Biology's the best science we've 
got to get back there now. I've had a nonexistent sperm count for years."
    "You love her?" Aaron asked.
    Jack looked at him with exasperation. "You aren't listening. That's not the 
point anymore-if it ever was, anywhere."


    "You're betting that the laws of physics are different out here than in our 
solar system," Aaron said to Kathy later that night, "and somehow your children 
can control them."
    "You have any better ideas at this point?"
    "We're talking three to four years for our baby to attain the kinds of 
powers Noah had over stars and planets. If she attains them. If Noah in fact 
really had them," Aaron replied. Morning-after tests had confirmed the 
conception as well as the gender of their child. They'd already named her 
too-Alicia-after his grandfather Al and Kathy's grandmother Alice. And because 
this whole strange journey had had an Alice in Wonderland quality from before 
day one. Wormholes and rabbit holes seemed much the same in this part of space.
    Back on Earth, even on Mars Vestibule, Aaron never would have gone for being 
a father again. Not even by proxied sperm. But now that it had happened, he had 
to admire the boldness of Kathy's move. It sang to him on lots of levels. 
Emotional, physical, even political.
    "You think Alicia won't be like Noah?" Kathy asked.
    "She's a girl and he's a boy," Aaron replied. "Who knows what effect that 
has on this? Then Roger's DNA and mine aren't the same. He's Irish, good Gaelic 
stock with maybe one or two Norse insertions, in the same place going back at 
least a thousand years. I'm Jewish-- my people came up to Spain, then across 
Europe to the shtetls in Russia and were raped by droves of Mongols and Cossacks 
along the way. Our genes are very different, Roger's and mine, and the 
interaction of his specific genes and yours could well be responsible for Noah's 
abilities, if he had them."
    "You still doubt them?"
    Aaron said nothing. Then, "I'm not sure. They certainly haven't been 
demonstrated with any scientific rigor."
    "Maybe Alicia will make a believer out of you....Look; I agree we're on very 
shaky ground here. I know Noah had those powers. Maybe no one else will. But 
maybe any child born on board out here, or just away from Sol, will have grand 
QM capacities."
    "So what's our next step?" Aaron finally allowed himself a small smile. 
"Encourage Nikki and Aviva to get pregnant too?"
    Kathy returned the smile and kissed him. "Not tonight."


    So far, Jack was the only other one Aaron felt he could talk to about this. 
"We've got to do something sooner," Aaron said the next morning. "We'll 
certainly be shit out of luck and fuel and stuck here long before our baby's 
even born unless we come up with at least a short-term solution. We can't afford 
to leave everything up to what powers Alicia may or may not have four years from 
now."
    "Only three possibilities I can see now if we want to do something other 
than let fate take its course," Jack said. "Back to N'urth-"
    Aaron shook his head. "No, that's the worst-my sense is we barely got off 
there in one piece last time."
    "Agreed," Jack said. "So we can take a closer look at the two gas giants out 
there, but Nikki says they don't seem to have much, if anything, of the kind of 
gas we need to drive home."
    "Right," Aaron said. "Leaded in an unleaded tank."
    "Worse: helium in an unleaded tank," Jack said. "So that leaves what the 
hulk out there might give us."
    "Which so far seems like McLaren with a fused central circuit," Aaron said.
    "Perhaps," Jack said. "Maybe even likely. But so far the hulk is the option 
we know least about. I can't see turning our back on it."
    Aaron weighed the possibilities.
    Jack continued. "I'm just saying the hulk is the only real option we've yet 
to explore. We can't be sure that it rather than McLaren's long stay on N'urth 
is what caused his problems. So its drawbacks are less than N'urth's-since we 
all felt the planet's strange impact down there-and presumably more than the gas 
giants'. But the big gasbags have nothing for us. So when you add up the risks 
and possible rewards, the hulk wins."
    "Let's talk to the rest of the crew about this."











Ten


    "How is it that I know you've come here to object to our trip to the hulk?" 
Aaron asked Nikki and Bo, who had come to see him in his office. "Yesterday 
afternoon you said you liked the idea."
    "We're objecting, but not to the trip," Bo said.
    "To what, then?" Aaron invited them to be seated.
    "The personnel," Bo said.
    "Oh?"
    "You're too valuable to do this," Nikki said. "Look what almost happened to 
you down on N'urth."
    "We've been through this before," Aaron said. "First, I don't want to risk 
anyone else's mind on that hulk. You see what's happened to McLaren. Second, 
this may well be a one-shot, all-or-nothing fling. Who knows what we'll find on 
board. Whoever's on the scene may have to make immediate life-and-death 
decisions affecting everyone else on our ship. It's proper that that's me. It's 
my job to make those kinds of calls."
    "We agree with almost all of that," Bo said. "Which is why we can't entrust 
it to a philosopher past eighty who believes in Indian voodoo and some 
half-baked genetics about George Bernard Shaw."
    "And the operative epithet there is what, Bo-philosophy, age, voodoo, 
Russell-Shaw?" Aaron knew it was all four.
    Nikki reached over and put a calming hand on Bo's. "Aaron, with all due 
respect, I-"
    "You agree with him, I know," Aaron said.
    "Not that you're too old to be trusted," Nikki said. "But Bo's best 
qualified to evaluate the fuel possibilities on site on that hulk. You know 
that's true."
    "Fuel's not the only concern," Aaron snapped back.
    "Now you look," Bo said. "You badgered us into letting you go down to 
N'urth. You badgered us into continuing the trip out here when we knew there 
wouldn't be enough fuel to get back. You can't hold this mission by the balls 
forever. Other people have a right. Our lives deserve to be in our hands 
sometimes-not always yours."
    "He's right, Aaron," Nikki said.
    Aaron looked at them. Time to compromise. Roger was in no position to help 
in this argument. Kathy had Noah-and Alicia-to think about. And what Bo and 
Nikki were saying was not without merit. "All right. But only you go," Aaron 
said to Bo. "You stay," he said to Nikki.
    "But the shuttle needs at least two if we don't want to leave it docked on 
the hulk," Nikki said. "Robots aren't reliable enough, given what we don't know 
about the hulk, to maintain the shuttle in near-hulk space."
    "We'll send along Hiro, then. He's a good pilot. I'd rather our food suffer 
for a few days than our computer operations." The truth was, and they knew it, 
that he was more concerned about both of them unchecked in what could be a 
pivotal decision situation on the hulk than he was about their computers here on 
the ship, which could be tended to just fine by Hiro and Aviva. But he hoped 
that the proposal of Hiro rather than Jack or himself for the shuttle would 
sweeten this just enough for Bo and Nikki to take it.
    Aaron wasn't completely sure of Hiro's loyalty or judgment either-certainly 
he wasn't as consistent as Roger or Kathy or Jack. Aaron still wasn't completely 
clear whose side Hiro had been on in Bo's attempted mutiny. But Hiro had never 
overtly opposed Aaron. And it really didn't matter anymore. Aaron had to trust 
someone who could fly, someone who might be acceptable to Nikki and Bo.
    The two looked at each other. Fortunately they seemed to see that half a 
loaf could provide some sustenance too. "OK," Nikki said, "we can live with 
that."
    "We'll need to do this right away," Aaron said.
    "I'm ready," Bo said. "I'll call Hiro."


    "We'll stay in constant contact now," Nikki said.
    Bo's response took a long time to reach them. Constant contact was more 
holes than contact out here. He was within boarding distance of the hulk. The 
Light Through was at what Nikki had reckoned to be a safe distance-about half 
the distance from Sol to Earth-should Bo's intrusion cause the hulk to blow up 
or do something dangerous, like emit radiation. Probably much more than a safe 
distance for anything they could logically expect might happen, much less for 
what they could not.
    Nikki's words took about four minutes to reach Bo, and his reply the same to 
get back. Eight again, Aaron noted. The number of years it had taken them to get 
from Mars to here. The number of minutes it had taken him to hustle across Bronx 
Park in a copious sweat on his way to the 205th Street subway station as a 
kid-late as always for whatever his first class happened to be at City College 
down on 125th Street. Late again.
    "OK," Bo said. "I'll tell you what I see as I see it."
    The hulk had precisely the maddening lack of clarity Bo had earlier 
described-no matter how close the probe, how powerful the computer scan, its 
image defied complete resolution, as if it were actually much farther away than 
it otherwise seemed to be, or was somehow not one but an infinite number of 
spherical vessels piled one on top of another. The rungs of an old Slinky toy, 
always slightly out of synch...
    Each of the crew dealt with the tension in a different way. Kathy was on the 
couch with her knees up and her legs tucked under, listening to Leslie Gore on 
an open speaker, as Aaron recalled a friend's sister doing in 1964. Nikki was on 
the computer, stroking the keys as if she were playing with a lover's fingers. 
Aviva was looking deeply into the screens, pixels no doubt swirling in fantastic 
new arrangements in her head. Jack was looking beyond all screens, into space 
somewhere, perhaps seeing things the rest of them could not. Noah was napping. 
And Aaron stole a glance or two at the Alpha Centauri suns, A and B-a pair of 
gleaming persimmons in the real-view window now, one feisty yellow, one purest 
orange-when he wasn't watching everyone else.
    But McLaren wasn't staring or listening or tense at all-he was beyond 
tension, outside it all, in a world in which eight minutes and eight years and 
eight seconds were likely one and the same.
    "OK, I'm going to inspect this thing with my own eyes," Bo said. "My best 
telecom readings here are exactly what all of our earlier reports said. No sign 
of life or fuel or anything."
    Nikki jabbed a key that said "OK" to Bo. "How the hell did it even get there 
without leaving a trace of its fuel?" she wondered aloud to the rest.
    "That's what Bo's there to find out," Kathy said.
    "Why are we all assuming that the ship was self-propelled?" Jack said. "Just 
because ours is? Maybe something else towed it out there."
    "Nice of you to speak up now," Aaron said, "after we've been discussing this 
for weeks."
    "Only just occurred to me," Jack said.
    "And it is a good point," Kathy said.
    "Sure, it is," Aaron said. "Let's add it to the list of explanations. It's 
some kind of illusion-we're living in Noah's dream. No-it was created by Noah, 
but it has an existence of its own now. Or, it used a propulsion system 
invisible to us, or one we can't understand. Maybe a self-consuming propulsion 
system, like a battery that collapses into something that looks nothing like a 
battery after it's used up. Or, it didn't really move in the sense we understand 
motion at all. Actually, it stood still, and created space and time structures 
around it, including-let's go for broke-ACA and its family. And now a new one: 
It was brought here by some kind of action at a distance, a celestial tow truck. 
Any other candidates?"
    "Maybe it was shot out of a cannon, like a projectile," Jack replied. "There 
are dozens of possibilities." He looked at Aaron. "You don't enjoy playing with 
possibilities like you used to."
    "Only those that have a chance of getting us home," Aaron said. "A spent 
projectile or a barge that needs a tugboat does us no good at all, without the 
gun or the tug."
    "Magic in a cosmic tit," Nikki said. "That's what Bo always said our fuel to 
get home was. Question is whether we'd be able to milk enough reality out of it. 
I sure hope that hulk ran on something better."
    "The man has his own eloquence," Jack mumbled. "Give him credit for that."
    "So far she's like a nightclub on Christmas morning," Bo said, as if on cue. 
"Empty. Nothing."
    Jack half laughed and grunted.
    "How much longer should we leave him there?" Aviva asked.
    Nikki gestured to a bank of teeming, tiny schematic screens. "He's already 
eyeballed more than eighty percent of the ship," she said. "Not much more to see 
there. We've got it all recorded. We'll be able to fine-scan it all. But so far 
it looks like more of the same blurry images on the inside as the outside. Empty 
and unclear."
    "Maybe the ship, inside and out, was designed to defy any precise 
observation," Aviva mused.
    "Like a protective cloaking or camouflage," Nikki responded. "It's certainly 
a possibility."
    Aaron sighed. "This is likely our last rational shot."
    "Doesn't mean it's our last shot," Jack said.
    "I know," Aaron said. "I know." He looked at the time, and at Nikki. "How 
much longer do you think he'll need to see the rest of the hulk?"
    "Three to five minutes," Nikki said.
    "All right. Bo." Aaron spoke deliberately into the com unit, though it would 
have picked up his voice wherever his mouth had been pointed. "I want you to 
leave the hulk and return to us as soon as you hear this. Hiro, as soon as Bo's 
back on board, please leave the vicinity of the hulk and dock with us." No point 
in risking Bo's life-or mind-any more than need be.
    Kathy put her hand over Aaron's. He could tell from her touch that she knew 
he was losing his faith in the possibility of their coming up with a way to get 
back to Earth. He could also tell that for some reason-maybe their child-she 
still had hers. This gladdened him. But it didn't make the future of the Light 
Through seem any more under their control.
    And then there was Jack, who seemed neither especially hopeful nor hopeless. 
He had the air of a man who'd cast his fate to the wind, and now was content to 
wait for the next breeze.
    Aaron wondered how all of them could be right.


    Three things made themselves known upon Bo and Hiro's rejoining the Light 
Through: Their ship seemed to have a bit more fuel aboard than previously 
calculated (good news). They seemed to be heading, for no apparent reason, back 
toward ACA (not good news). And Bo was not the person he was when he left to 
enter the hulk (not necessarily bad news-but unsettling because of the obvious 
parallels to McLaren).
    Hiro was talking at a meeting. "I heard your message to return. Certainly. 
But I don't know about Bo. He showed up on my shuttle with a hurt look in his 
eyes. He says he has no recollection of receiving an order from you to return."
    "Hurt?" Kathy asked.
    "Yes," Hiro said. "Hard to describe in words. But his expression reminded me 
of a peach bruised under the surface, in such a way that the skin wasn't really 
broken or even darkened, yet there was something different in the 
sheen-something speaking of a blow earlier received."
    "A blow to the psyche," Kathy said.
    "Perhaps," Hiro replied. "Yes."
    "But why'd he return to your shuttle at that time if he heard no order to 
return?" Nikki asked.
    "I don't know," Hiro said. "That's the problem. I agree-it seems too much to 
be a coincidence. Maybe he heard your message but then forgot it."
    "But you don't believe that," Aaron said.
    "No," Hiro said, "I don't." He closed his eyes and reached for the right 
words. "I think it looked to me like he was operating in reverse. Like he was 
retracing his own steps..."
    "But not because of my message?" Aaron persisted.
    "No, not because of your message. And not of his own accord. It was like 
some force had pushed him back again to the shuttle."
    "A force from the hulk?" Jack asked.
    "I don't know," Hiro said. "Maybe, but my instruments picked up nothing."
    Nikki agreed. "We've gone over the shuttle's data a thousand ways to Sunday, 
and there's no trace of anything from the hulk."
    "In other words, no change in the hulk from the first time we saw it. Dead, 
dead, dead," Kathy said.
    "Yes," Nikki said.
    Jack said, "Meaning, no sign from the hulk that was picked up by our 
instruments."
    "Well, right," Nikki said, "but what's the point of talking about something 
that we can't in any way perceive, even through our instruments?"
    "OK, please," Aaron said. "Let's not get into another debate about Kantian 
epistemology. Yes, there may be something about that hulk, but our instruments 
can't perceive it, and if our instruments can't pick it up, and we have no 
knowledge of it, there's no point in talking about it now. Let's move on."
    "Oh, there's definitely something strange about that hulk," Kathy said. 
"Turned Roger into an autistic, and took away a piece of Bo's memory. No doubt 
about that. Bo wasn't down on N'urth at all. So if his mind's going the way of 
Roger's, that could only be because of the one new experience they both had in 
common: that hulk."


    They met again the next morning.
    "He's not exactly like Roger," Nikki said. "Bo's grown sullen, withdrawn, 
introspective. He's sleeping a lot. It's like he saw or sensed something there 
that his mind can't quite handle. Something that drew so much energy from his 
mind that it had to shut down a part of itself to continue to function."
    "It overloaded Roger's completely," Kathy said.
    "He was likely there longer," Aaron said.
    "Paradoxes are like that," Jack said. "From the point of view of information 
theory, they can drive you crazy-they perpetually invite you to bring more 
information to a situation than you can possibly handle. Every time you come up 
with a solution, you come up with its unraveling. 'This statement is a lie'-if 
it's true then it's a lie, but that means it isn't true, which means it's a lie, 
which means it's true-"
    "We can't send anyone else back there," Aaron said. "Whatever paradox Bo 
experienced, if that's what it is, he'll have to tell us about it."
    "He may not be able to," Jack said, "if he's still caught up in it in some 
way."
    "We may not be able to," Kathy said, "if we're still experiencing it-if 
we're a part of it."
    Nikki sighed. "Now you see why I don't like talking about things e can't 
measure. At least we have a clear indication of our increasing fuel."
    "Really increasing?" Jack mused. "You sure?"
    "As sure as I can be that anything I'm seeing or reading is real," Nikki 
replied. "We apparently have more fuel in our holds than we did last 
week-weight, gauges, ship's performance-all are in line with the increase."
    "Impossible," Aviva muttered.


    Hiro asked for another meeting after dinner that evening.
    "I think the food's different too," Hiro said.
    "What do you mean?" Aaron asked.
    "The amount of food is more like last week than two days ago," Hiro said. "I 
realized this just this afternoon."
    "You mean the quantity of food has increased-like our fuel?" Aaron asked.
    "Yes," Hiro said.
    "Is the increase in the living plants and organisms, or in the food already 
harvested?" Jack asked.
    "Is that important?" Hiro responded. "Don't know for sure. The increase I'm 
certain of is in our food stores-in our harvested food, ready to eat. We keep 
about three hundred-"
    "That's OK," Jack said. "We don't need the numbers. But you say you don't 
know if the live nursery stock increased?"
    "Well," Hiro said, "let's see. I looked at them also a few hours ago, and, 
no, I'd say they haven't increased at all. They're as they should be."
    "Hmm," Jack said. "OK, how about some of the more inert hydroponic 
equipment-you know, the tubing, that kind of thing?"
    "What are you getting at, Jack?" Aaron asked.
    "The difference between living and nonliving material," Kathy answered for 
him, "or maybe between living and formerly living matter."
    "Not sure what you mean about equipment," Hiro said "You mean is there more 
of it, less of it? I'd say it's the same."
    "I mean is it showing wear and usage as it should be?" Jack said.
    "Oh, I see," Hiro said, "though I don't know what that would tell s. No, I 
don't know about wear on the equipment. I'll have to check."
    "I'm with Hiro in not knowing what this is telling us," Aaron said. "We've 
got anomalies in mental phenomena, in McLaren and Bo. We've got strange 
occurrences in physical material, in food and fuel increases. But not in living 
organisms? What's that add up to?"
    "Nonliving material, living material, thinking material," Jack said, eyes 
focused on nothing, or on something well beyond the room. "Someone made that 
distinction in a paper I heard at the AAAS way back in the ancient 1980s," he 
said to Aaron. "Three different realms. Three different properties. Maybe three 
different responses to the river that flows both ways."
    "Nikki," Aaron said, "I'm still not getting what Jack is talking about here. 
But do a scan of everything you can get a light on in this ship. Let's see if 
there are any other ... increases."
    "OK," Nikki said. "But I can tell you right now about at least one other 
thing that's increasing: our approach velocity to ACA."
    "Can't we control it?" Aaron asked.
    "I'm trying," Nikki answered.
    "Are we on a collision course this time?" Aaron asked.
    "I don't think so," Jack replied.
    










Eleven


    Water combed the beach in green foamy swirls. The tide was receding, each 
swirl claiming a minute-hand less of the sand. Close up revealed a thousand 
hermit crabs and nearly as many snails scurrying for food or sun or whatever 
they craved on the drenched, exposed shore.
    Could have been near the rocks at Montauk, or maybe the Brewster Flats at 
the start of low tide on Cape Cod Bay.
    Except it was a beach on N'urth. They were approaching the planet again, on 
a course that Nikki was unable to change.
    A world without a moon...
    So how come it had tides?
    And how could Noah, who'd never seen Montauk or Cape Cod or anything similar 
on Earth, have had anything at all to do with its configuration?
    Aaron had looked over their library holos very carefully, and the fact was 
that, as extensive as the library was, it simply had no images of this kind. It 
did not, after all, have an image of every possible scene on Earth.
    So how could Noah have copied this? How could he have copied that which he 
never saw?
    Aaron sighed and looked at the time. It was after midnight. Nothing more he 
or anyone apparently could do about the Light Through's new trajectory. Nikki 
was sure, at least, that they wouldn't hit the planet. She and the rest of the 
crew were trying to get a few hours of sleep. Aaron had tried and couldn't. 
Might as well put the time to some use.
    He sat down at his screen and opened a file: "Memo: re: Noah's Method."
    He didn't have the answers, but whatever he had he needed to write down. 
Now, while there still was time. He'd do it in philotext-a philosopher's 
hypertext tool he'd helped develop more than twenty years earlier. It allowed 
the careful thinker to put together all kinds of reasoning chains on the screen.
    Of course, the chains were rarely stronger than their weakest links, and 
most of the connections he had were very tentative. But even if he had only 
unanswered questions to send back to Earth, they were a lot better than nothing.
    

    QUESTION: Assuming Noah had the powers Kathy believes, how could he have 
copied images of Earth he never saw?
    ANSWER: He didn't copy.
    INTERPRETATION 1: Noah was not responsible for N'urth.
    INTERPRETATION 2: Noah was responsible, but not via copying.
    If INTERPRETATION 1 is the case, then
    INTERPRETATION 1 a, Who or what else was responsible?
    Or, INTERPRETATION 1b, What was N'urth that it behaved this way?
    Since INTERPRETATION 1a and 1b require additional information not currently 
available, let us table Interpretation 1 for now.
    That leaves Interpretation 2: Noah's power utilized some technique other 
than copying.
    ELABORATION: He was a builder, a creator, but not via blueprints. For 
blueprints in some sense look like what they engender, are recoverable via 
reverse engineering from completed structures.
    CONTEXT: Deriving a blueprint for a house already built is trivially easy.
    OBSERVATION: Nothing about understanding N'urth is trivially easy.
    BACKGROUND DETAILS: Here is this new planet. Here is everything that Nikki 
and Kathy say Noah has done. But no one has the vaguest idea of how he actually 
did it. Here is Kathy carrying my baby, which she thinks might be able to do 
something like this again, something that might help us, yet no one knows what 
that "this" even was.
    

    Aaron frowned. No, that wouldn't do. Alicia didn't belong in this report-not 
yet.
    He deleted the text beginning with "Here is Kathy..." and resumed typing.
    Perhaps someone does know. Maybe McLaren. But he seems incapable of 
communication now.
    NEW QUESTION: What did McLaren see?
    ANSWER: Impossible to say.
    QUESTION REFINED: What did he understand?
    ANSWER: Same.
    CONCLUSION/PATH: Back to Noah.
    QUESTION: Did Noah bring these realms into being? Yes or no?
    ANSWER: Not known, but not via blueprints.
    FOLLOW-ON QUESTION: How, possibly, then?
    PATH: Back to McLaren.
    FACT: McLaren wrote, 'To understand this tyop, change the arrangement of its 
letters."
    STATEMENT CATEGORY: A recipe for self-effacement.
    FOLLOW-ON CATEGORY: A warning? Maybe.
    BEST CATEGORY, ONE WORD: Recipe.
    ANALOGY: Living recipes.
    BEST ANALOGY, ONE WORD OR PHRASE: DNA.
    ELABORATION: Maybe Noah worked by creating self-actualizing, evolving 
recipes-
    

    Kathy walked in.
    "You can't sleep either," he said.
    She nodded, came over, put her arms around him.
    "I can get back to this later," Aaron said.
    "No, you finish up." She kissed him. "Want something to eat?"
    "I'm fine," Aaron said. "I'll just be a few more minutes."
    Kathy left the room and Aaron returned to his screen.
    It was blank.
    "Damn." Aaron checked the four places where his file should have 
automatically been saved. Only one had the file-it had been saved there a split 
second earlier. The other three places bore no indication of a file at all. 
Aaron called the file back to his screen. It disappeared in the directory.
    "What the hell..."
    Then it vanished on his screen as well.
    Aaron shook his head in frustration. Just what he needed now- a wonky 
computer. A cyber-corollary of Murphy's Law: Computers always seem to act up at 
the worst possible time.
    Well, there was nothing he couldn't re-create later in his philotext. He'd 
mention this to Nikki in the morning. He put his computer to sleep and went in 
to join Kathy.


    He thought he could hear Alicia's heartbeat, with his head next to Kathy's 
belly, but it was only the blood in his ears. She was barely old enough to have 
a discernible heart, let alone a heartbeat.
    Thump ... thump ... They would miss N'urth, but were still speeding at full, 
irrevocable force toward its sun.
    Jack thought they weren't on a collision course.
    Why not?
    Jack needed more time to work out the theory behind this, but he thought 
they would swing around the star, just like before, close as Aaron's ear was to 
Alicia. Close but untouched, he'd told Aaron.
    Iroquois insight? It didn't matter. Nikki seemed unable to affect their 
course in any case.
    N'urth's stats were holding steady-no real change there since their visit: a 
couple of hurricanes in the southern hemisphere, a quake halfway between the 
equator and the northern pole. Nothing obviously untoward. Maybe the place was 
really stabilizing. Made it all the more tempting. Aaron hated to pass it by. 
But who could say what was brewing below its surface? Who could say what it 
would be like tomorrow?
    McLaren's stats were sadly holding steady too-no real change in him since 
the day they'd picked him up in his shuttle. The last thing anyone could want 
was that Roger would stabilize in his current condition. Aaron hated to even 
think about what lay below Roger's surface. But he expected that, sooner or 
later, if he wanted to help Roger, he would have to figure it out.
    Jack thought they had a chance. The legend come true.
    "I can almost hear Alicia's heartbeat," Aaron said to Kathy.
    She put a cool hand on his head and pulled him close.


    The second twirl around the star was nothing to write home about. It was 
close to ACA, all right-the same exact distance as last time-but they were able 
to manually boost the eco-cooling system so that everyone on the ship was 
comfortable.
    Just as Jack had said.
    Aaron invited Bo to lunch in his office the next day.
    "You're looking much better," Aaron truthfully said.
    "Thanks," he said. "I'm feeling good too."
    "But we still don't have enough fuel to get home," Aaron said.
    "Right," Bo said, "nowhere near enough, our increase has been small-we have 
now pretty much what we had when we first approached the star."
    "Yet you're feeling good," Aaron said. "Feeling good even though we have 
nothing like enough fuel to get back home now. That's not like the old Bo at 
all."
    "Right," Bo said. "I'm feeling good. But that is like the old Bo. Because 
fuel's no longer the issue. We're not running on fuel anymore."
    "But Nikki says that-"
    "I know what Nikki says," Bo said. "It's an ingenious idea but it's wrong. 
That star or hulk couldn't have done anything to our fuel to make it increase 
because it was consumed. Goes against a much-too-basic law of physics. 
Consumption is consumption. Less may be more in psychology, but not in reality."
    "Nikki's backup explanation is that the instrument readings are wrong," 
Aaron said.
    "She's been listening too much to you," Bo said. "Meanwhile, our ship is 
still moving. In the right direction. If we were really out of fuel, and the 
readings incorrectly reported an increase, we'd be drifting on inertia in space 
by now."
    "Well, the momentum from our new swing back around the star-"
    "Isn't enough to move us anywhere," Bo said. "But even if it were ... Open 
your eyes-our velocity's increasing much faster than any of the boomerang 
equations can explain. Something else is going on out here."
    "So what's your explanation for this?"
    "I don't know why this is happening," Bo replied, "but I can tell you what I 
think is happening: We're rolling back in time, back in time and place to Sol, 
where we started."
    Aaron scoffed. "Jack's saying the same thing. I'm surprised at you. That's 
no more scientific than Wise Oak's vision."
    "I don't deal in visions," Bo said. "I work with tangibles. And if they 
point in a certain direction, I go with it. Frankly, my backward-in-time theory 
feels a lot more scientific than all that stuff about Noah. Time and space and 
speed have been linked together by physicists for years. Who knows, maybe what 
you think was caused by Noah's powers was brought on by our approach to the 
point where we'd soon be reversing in time." Bo shrugged. "So tell me, how are 
you feeling these days?"
    "Good," Aaron said. "I'm fine."
    "I'm glad," Bo said. "I mean it. Are you feeling any younger?"
    Aaron laughed. "Even if we were rolling back time, not enough of the 
rollbacks occurred for me to really feel it in that way-eighty and eight months 
is as much a decrepit age as eighty-one."
    "Give yourself time then," Bo said. "Maybe you'll see what I mean."
    "But if we are rolling back in time, how come we remember what happened on 
the far side of the star?" Aaron asked. "I remember clear as day when we picked 
you up at the hulk."
    "Everything's a haze with me about the hulk," Bo said. "Maybe it affects 
different people differently. I didn't say I had all the answers yet."
    A chime indicated an urgent incoming call. "One minute, Bo." Aaron turned 
his attention to the console.
    "How much you wanna bet that it's one you've already seen before," Bo said.
    No, it couldn't be that simple. A time reversal, if that was what was going 
on, couldn't be that straightforward-nothing on this trip had been.
    "I'm out of here, Bo-we'll pick this up later." Aaron rushed out the door.
    Kathy was having some sort of abdominal pains.


    Muscle spasm, false alarm, please; that's what he was praying for.
    The seconds it took Aaron to reach Kathy's office seemed longer than their 
whole damned trip.
    But every once in a blue moon or an orange star, prayers are answered.
    "It's OK." Kathy pointed to the screen, where a zoegram of Alicia, no bigger 
than a fist, floated in holographic insouciance. "She's fine. I'm OK. Whatever 
caused the pain is gone. These things happen all the time back on Earth."
    "Yeah," Aaron said, "but most people on Earth aren't going through what we 
are now." He helped Kathy off with the equipment and off the table. He hugged 
her.
    Alicia's recorded three-dimensional image was still afloat on the screen. 
"She's beautiful," Aaron said. Then it winked out.
    Aaron muttered something about computers and tapped the machine.
    Kathy pulled him over and put his hand on her stomach. "Who cares about the 
image? Alicia's just fine in here."
    "Yeah," Aaron said, and smiled at the baby within.
    "You were worried that the time rollback could hurt Alicia? I've been 
talking a lot about the fine points of that with Jack and Bo."
    "I don't know," Aaron said. "If we really are in some sort of rollback, then 
Alicia could be the first way that we'd notice its effect on people. She'd-she'd 
cease to exist in a few months. And then Noah. He'd get younger and younger and 
then just disappear halfway back to Sol? I can't bear thinking about that."
    Kathy zipped up her blouse, then sat down to put on her shoes. "No," she 
said, and rubbed her stomach. "Alicia's fine. I'm sure of that. And Noah's 
better than ever. His special capacities are gone, but his intellect's as 
powerful as ours already-maybe in some ways stronger."
    "You thought his GQM powers were fading before any of these rollback effects 
even began," Aaron said.
    "Right," Kathy said, "so their disappearance doesn't seem connected to 
whatever's going on now. Although-I guess a last gasp of Noah's QM powers could 
have brought on the time reversal, if that's what it is."
    "Maybe the time reversal will bring them back," Aaron mused. "Hard to tell 
which end is up, just what's caused what, at this point. Jack thinks the strings 
that tie matter together are really rubber bands. It certainly then wouldn't be 
implausible that on a ship hurtling at half the speed of light to a star that 
flips the ship on its ass and bounces it backward in time, that on a ship like 
that a young boy's brain, in its developmental stage, under that kind of 
expanding and contracting pressure of time and space, could achieve some sort of 
quantum mechanical power over matter, and then lose it. Bo was just suggesting 
something that could fit in with that. Nikki was talking about our slowdown from 
half-C being like an accordion in space even before the time rollback. Who 
knows."
    "Too bad it didn't have that effect on older brains too," Kathy said.
    "Thanks, but mine's too far gone for any power in the universe to have any 
effect on it, I can tell you that," Aaron said.
    Kathy smiled. "I was serious. You know, there could be a lot of good in this 
rollback-in addition to getting back home, of course. You and Jack would lose a 
few years; Roger could get his right mind back. And ..." Her smile vanished.
    "Let's pray it doesn't work that way," Aaron said. "The kids are more 
important."
    "They're OK. I told you," Kathy said. "You're OK too." She reached up and 
kissed him full on the lips.
    That pleased Aaron. She's getting used to me as the father of her baby, he 
thought. Our baby.
    "Let's see her again," Aaron said. "Would that be OK?"
    "Sure," Kathy said, and grinned. She undressed and they hooked up the 
equipment they had just disconnected.
    They watched Alicia's live zoegram, an image of life sprung from its place.
    Aaron carefully put his hand through the edge of the gram, and brought it to 
rest, palm up, under Alicia's shimmering soul.


    "No doubt about it now," Nikki said to the assembled group the very next 
morning. "Unless all of our instrumentation on every level of redundancy is 
wrong, we've rolled back in time about five months. If the pattern continues, 
we'll soon be well on our way back to Sol."
    "Just to be clear about this one more time: The instruments are not just 
replaying the readings they had five months ago; they're accurately and 
completely reporting increases in fuel and all the other stuff now?" Aaron 
asked.
    "It's really happening, Aaron," Nikki answered. "Jack and Bo were right."
    "We're going home," Bo said. "You were right," he said to Aaron and Jack. 
"I'm big enough to admit that. The river flows both ways. Not as a boomerang in 
space, but in time."
    "Apparently," Aaron said. "But what does that mean? If we wind up back at 
Mars Vestibule eight years ago with no knowledge of what we've experienced, this 
whole trip will have been a complete waste of time-literally. Maybe we can send 
out some kind of record of our experience ..."
    "If what's really going on is that time is rolling back for us," Jack said, 
"then sending out a record won't do us any good-it'll be subject to the same 
time rollback."
    "Meaning?" Aaron asked.
    "Meaning that the record will stop existing shortly after we send it 
anywhere," Nikki said. "It will have become part of a later time that no longer 
exists. Same applies to any messages we try to send to Naomi back on 
Earth-they'll never arrive. Same for any messages we already sent to Naomi or 
anyone-they'll get caught up in the rollback too. By the time we get back, no 
records that we exported from the ship during the voyage will be in existence. 
They'll be gone-if this rollback is really going on-just like our sixteen 
years."
    Aaron thought about how he had agonized over what kind of message to send 
back to Naomi in response to Percival's. He thought about his philotext 
analysis. Even the recording of Alicia's zoegram. All gone, or soon to be. Aaron 
exhaled slowly. The consequences of this were daunting. "OK," he said. "I think 
I'm getting it. But if we're really in a time rollback, shouldn't we be seeing 
replays of the messages we've received here in the past years? I mean, if we 
received a message from home on our way here-like the one I got from Percival 
five months ago as we were just entering this system-shouldn't we be seeing that 
message again now, as we pass through the same time point on our way back?"
    "Right," Nikki said. "Makes sense-I hadn't thought of that."
    "Yet we haven't received that message again," Aaron said.
    Nikki looked uncertain. "I don't know-maybe the time rollback isn't entirely 
uniform."
    "That's what I've been trying to say all along," Jack said. "Though I'm not 
sure how this message phenomenon fits in."
    "Well, look," Kathy said, "the very fact that we can talk now about 
receiving a message five months ago shows that our cognition is not being rolled 
back."
    "That, and Roger's condition is the same, regrettably," Hiro said, as if 
Roger weren't in the room. Then Hiro realized Roger was, and bowed his head 
apologetically in Roger's direction. Roger stared someplace toward the center of 
the table, with an expression that said he understood either everything or 
nothing at all.
    "I wish I could help you," Bo said to Roger. "I think a tiny part of my 
brain is like yours-I've got a hole in there somewhere, but I can work around 
it."
    Roger looked away from him.
    "So we seem to be in some sort of... fuzzy rollback in time," Aaron said. 
"The material indices are mostly clear. But the living and cognitive gauges are 
contrary."
    "Right," Jack said. "There's probably something more going on here."
    "The macro QM business again?" Kathy asked.
    Aaron knew she was thinking about Alicia and her possible powers. Kathy had 
told him that so far Alicia didn't seem to have the same intrauterine sway over 
her as Noah, though Kathy couldn't say exactly when Noah's persuasions had 
started.
    "Not likely," Nikki said. "Whatever was going on then seems to have 
stopped-completely."
    "Yes, of course it would," Kathy said. "As far as Noah's impact is 
concerned. After all, if our cognition is not being rolled back, there's no 
reason that we would be recapitulating any mental phenomena from five months 
ago. And GQM is obviously cognition driven. No, I was thinking..."
    "About Alicia?" Nikki completed the thought.
    Kathy nodded.
    "Well, I guess we'll just have to see," Nikki said. Aaron knew that she was 
less than pleased about even a long-shot prospect of another child with Noah's 
erstwhile possible powers in their midst. He'd talked to Kathy months ago about 
keeping Alicia secret for a while, keeping his fatherhood secret for a while, 
maybe for forever, from some of the group. They'd gone over all the options, and 
decided that secrets like that didn't make much sense in this ship.
    Others likely shared Nikki's mixed feelings about Alicia, but Aaron had no 
intention of taking a poll. He caught Aviva's eye, though, and she was smiling 
at him. A genuine, open smile. It warmed him. He looked up at Noah's image, 
projected on Kathy's mom-screen. He was sleeping so peacefully. You wouldn't 
believe, looking at that image, that he had had much power over anything....
    Aaron smiled back at Aviva. Thank you. Glad you're here. I've probably paid 
less attention to you than to anyone else on board, but I'm glad you're here.
    "Any chance this could somehow bring Sarah back to us?" Aviva asked. "I 
mean, I can't see exactly how that could happen-her just popping back into our 
ship, alive, from deep space-but still..."
    Jack shook his head slowly. "No, I don't think so. Life and intelligence 
seem to be moving one way in this rollback-forward. Our lives are going onward, 
our memories continue, we're all getting older against the backward flow, while 
nonliving materials, our ship, the fuel and nonliving things in it, are going 
the other way, with the reverse flow. So I can't see how the nonliving material 
of Sarah could make the leap over that gap and become alive again. I guess it's 
possible her body could rejoin the ship-and I guess anything is possible here; 
we'll just have to wait and see-but I think her life is gone from us, gone for 
good."
    Aaron shuddered.
    "In the meantime, even the results of the GQM are disappearing," Nikki 
sighed. "N'urth is beginning to look more like Mars again than like Earth."
    Aaron focused on what she was saying. He suppressed another shudder. Good 
thing they hadn't decided to stay down there.
    "It should be that way," Jack said. "N'urth should be affected by the 
rollback-it's a material system, comprised of some living components, but a 
material system on the whole nonetheless."
    "Like this ship," Nikki said.
    Jack nodded.
    "But our ship's going back in time, and we're alive, and N'urth's going back 
in time too, but it's losing its living systems," Nikki said.
    "Right," Jack replied. "Because the Light Through in its past state was 
designed to support life-us-but the planet down there was not."
    "But there was life down there," Kathy said.
    "Yes," Jack said. "But the planet itself is a primarily physical system. All 
planets are. The idea that they are somehow unified living organisms-the Gaia 
hypothesis-is just a metaphor."
    And the river that flows both ways isn't? Aaron thought. Maybe not. This 
time rollback seemed to be making Jack's river more real and less metaphoric by 
the minute.
    "But the hulk's still there," Kathy said. "And it's apparently material."
    "Yes," Hiro said, "which shows the hulk is not a result of our GQM, not 
something that emerged with our visit. It was there, like Alpha Centauri A 
itself, before we ever arrived."
    Bo grimaced. It was a quick, involuntary gesture, but deep.
    "Typo," McLaren blurted out.
    "What did you say?" Nikki asked.
    "He said typo," Kathy said. "Tyop to typo. Maybe progress."
    They all looked at Roger, hoping he'd say something more. He stared 
impassively on.
    "Maybe not," Kathy said, and went" over to him and rubbed his back.
    "Maybe not for Roger-as yet-but maybe for the universe," Jack said. "Maybe 
the rollback is a recipe for human settlement of the cosmos that respects the 
harmony of being, one that returns things to their proper place after we leave. 
Cleans up our litter. A self-restoring system. A recipe-as you were exploring in 
that vanished philotext you told me about, Aaron-a rearrangement of letters, of 
the materials they represent, from humanly created confusion to natural 
coherence. Tyop to typo. A recipe that, as they used to say, is EC, ecologically 
correct."
    "A typo's coherent?" Nikki asked.
    "Good point." Aaron nodded. "But even if it is, how, given this time 
rollback, can we even communicate this revelation back to Naomi and everyone on 
Earth?" If there was just some way they could position information, records, 
analyses like his philotext, to jump this time barrier...
    "Why don't we just tell them when we arrive?" Bo asked.
    "Won't work," Aaron replied. "If we really are returning to Sol via a time 
reversal, then for everyone at home it will seem like we never left in the first 
place when we return. They'll have only our word for what happened out here. Why 
should anyone believe us, with no proof or records?"
    "You're recordocentric," Jack said. "Lots of unrecorded recipes throughout 
history have been lost to us. Whole cultures. But somehow their messages still 
got through."
    "Like your Wise Oak," Bo said. Not sarcastically. Not confrontationally. 
Just said. Aaron marveled.
    "Yes," Jack said.
    "We've got to do better," Aaron said.
    "We already have," Kathy asserted. "We have children. Their very existence 
speaks louder than any recipe or record that we've been away from Earth. And the 
rest of us will look sixteen years older."
    Assuming we're all still alive, Aaron could not help thinking.
    Bo nodded sympathetically. "But I'll be honest with you," he said softly, 
intensely. "I don't really care about recipes and proof. All that matters to me 
is getting home-all of us. I'll tell you a little story, a true story, from my 
own family. My father had no money. He could have borrowed some from a bank, he 
could have bought a home for us with a mortgage, but he had to figure out all 
the possibilities first. And so he spent his life figuring and figuring, and he 
died living in a putrid, peeling flat in Saint Petersburg. That's where I come 
from.
    "Meanwhile, my uncle also had no money. But he didn't give a damn. He 
borrowed some money, moved his family to Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn, and bought 
a nice house. My father said, Miklosh, you're crazy. How will you be able to pay 
back the mortgage, pay for the house you're in? And my uncle said, I'll get in 
the house first; I'll live in the house and figure out how to pay later. 
Meanwhile, I'm enjoying my house-I'm in my home.
    "And that's all that counts now. Getting back home. We'll have the rest of 
our lives to figure it out later."


    Aaron held Kathy's hand as they looked out at Alpha Centauri in the 
real-view. Kathy was very pregnant now. ACA, on the other hand- the sun they had 
traveled eight years to encounter-was a quarter of the size it had been the last 
time he had looked. It had merged together with its orange sister now, rejoined 
her, into a single zygote of light.
    "Are you sorry we did this?" Aaron asked, moving his hand right over where 
he thought Alicia's head might be. "It looks like Alicia won't have the powers 
that Noah had." Noah was on the other side of the room, reciting something to 
Roger-the letter Roger had written to them on N'urth, which Noah had memorized.
    "For all we know, Alicia had the power, and created in a few hours the whole 
time rollback that we're now a part of," Kathy said.
    "No limit to the number of wildflower hypotheses we can pick from here." 
Aaron hugged her and kissed her on the neck. "Part of the charm of this whole 
affair. I should learn to enjoy it more."
    "You should," Kathy said. "Who knows what kind of feelings and powers a baby 
in the uterus really has-especially out here in space. But science aside, I'm 
thrilled with our baby." She nuzzled against Aaron.
    "There's no doubt now that none of us is getting any younger," he said. "The 
time rollback has no effect on us-just the nonliving things around us, things 
most likely to follow the arrow of time wherever it goes. Let's say the 
Russell-Shaw longevity factor makes me the equivalent of sixty. People die 
younger than that. Look what happened to Sarah. I hope Alicia knows her father."
    "Don't be ridiculous," Kathy said. "You're mixing together too many things. 
Sure, a twenty-year-old-Christ, a little child-can get killed by a car whose 
scanners are off, can die of unexplained natural causes. There's no protection 
in the universe against that. That's what happened to Sarah. Could happen to me. 
Could happen to you. But he odds are, the great likelihood is, that you'll live 
not only to see Alicia born, but her children. Same as me."
    Aaron nodded. "I have no grandchildren back on Earth. I was very unhappy 
about that-never really accepted it, never was resigned to having my line die 
out, melodramatic as that seems. But what could I do about it? Argue my 
philosophy of life with my eco-minded kids? They said it was just my vanity. Now 
... now everything's changed. We'll be returning with a baby young enough to be 
their granddaughter."
    "The important thing is we're returning," Kathy said. "All of us, and our 
baby. You should be happy about that."
    "I am." Aaron put her hand to his lips.
    "As for the rest," Kathy continued, "the ripples you might make coming home 
an unexpected father in your high eighties-well, that'll be the least of the 
ways we'll be shaking up the people back home when they see what we've done on 
this trip. We'll show them. All the Earth-glued losers. We'll show them the 
future."
    And their eyes never wavered from Alpha Centauri.




































PART 2


Omega Centouri


     








Twelve


    Noah


    Aaron looked around the Seder table. "Everyone knows why we're gathered here 
this evening," he said, and talked about the meaning of Passover, the Jews as 
slaves in Egypt, the meaning of the wine and the matzo.
    And Noah, nearly ten years old now, thought about the Stones- the Rolling 
Stones-one of his favorite groups, and their song "2000 Light-years from Home." 
Well, they weren't that far-Earth was just two light-years away now-but what 
were a few more decimals among friends?
    Around this table sat everyone in Noah's world-everyone he'd ever known in 
this universe. Aaron with his plush felt yarmulke on his bushy white head, Jack 
with the little frown that was really the smile that Noah knew was always there, 
and Noah's biological dad, who still couldn't talk to him with words.... And 
Uncle Hiro and Uncle Bo and Auntie Aviva and Auntie Nikki-"auhntie, not antie, 
Noah-even an honorary aunt doesn't want to be called an ant"-were at the table. 
And of course his mother. And, oh, yeah, Alicia too.
    "... and the charoseth symbolizes the mortar that the Jewish people used to 
build the pyramids when they were slaves in Egypt," Aaron said, and passed the 
stuff around the table. It was a mixture of apples, cinnamon, nuts, and 
wine-delicious, a lot better-tasting than the ancient mortar must have been. 
Everyone smiled and nodded their appreciation to Hiro.
    Alicia was asking the four questions. "Why is this night different from all 
other nights?" she asked.
    "Because we're still way out in deep space, traveling backward in time?" Bo 
asked.
    Aaron laughed. "That's as good an answer as any," he said.
    Of course, for Alicia and Noah, space wasn't different-it was the same. 
Planet life would be different. And as for traveling backward in time, that's 
all Alicia had ever known. And even Noah had no real memory of what the ship was 
like when the fuel and food stocks and everything else got less and less as they 
were used, not more and more.
    "Noah, would you like to take over the reading now?" Aaron asked.
    "Sure," he said. Noah read aloud about the four sons-the wise son, the 
wicked son, the stupid son, and the son with no capacity to inquire. The wise 
son already understood the reason for the Seder, so the Seder was not necessary 
for him. The wicked son, with his arrogance that none of this was true, put 
himself outside the group, so the Seder wasn't for him either. (Noah always felt 
like him, because he didn't really believe the ancient stories.) The stupid 
son's questions could be answered very quickly and simply, so no entire, 
convoluted Seder was needed for him. But the son who had not the capacity to 
inquire- he posed a problem because no one could know what was on his mind. So 
he was the reason for the Seder, and the telling again and again of the Passover 
story.
    Noah knew what everyone was thinking when he talked about the son with no 
capacity to inquire. They were thinking about his real father, about Roger. Noah 
took Roger's hand under the table and squeezed it. It's OK, Dad, he thought.
    He could tell Roger the story of their voyage, like the story of Passover. 
How Aaron had half tricked the government to get this voyage going. How Uncle Bo 
had almost mutinied halfway out but Aaron talked Auntie Nikki into overriding 
Bo. How the crew lost someone they loved-her name was Sarah. He could talk about 
the hulk, about heir rollback voyage home. But Noah felt certain that Roger 
already new all of that, and more.
    "Let's eat," Aaron finally said, and passed a plate of Hiro's chicken soup 
that Aaron swore was better than his grandmother's. She must've been one great 
cook, Noah thought.


    Nikki and Bo and Aviva and Hiro were gone by eleven. Roger too. Alicia was 
sleeping on the couch. Aaron and Jack and Kathy were talking around the table, 
aware that Noah was there but talking as if he weren't, a scene he'd been part 
of so many times.
    "You're worried because you can't do anything," Jack said to Aaron. "Worried 
not so much because there's a clear-cut problem, but more because you couldn't 
do anything if there were. We've been over this before."
    "That's right," Aaron answered. "We have no effect on the universe around us 
now-anything we do hasn't happened the very next moment, so every cause is 
robbed of its effect."
    "Has a nice ring to it," Kathy said dreamily. She finished off a glass of 
sweet red wine.
    "May have a nice ring," Aaron said, "but it means we've lost our power, 
utterly, to influence anything beyond this ship other than in the 
infinitesimally immediate term. Even here, inside the Light Through, there are 
lots of things we can't do. We just all go along with the reverse flow. And, 
yes, that always worries me."
    "We didn't have all that much effect on the universe going out to Alpha 
Centauri in the first place," Jack said.
    "There's always some loss of control when you're going into the unknown," 
Aaron replied. "But that was a different situation entirely."
    Jack shook his head. "You express a culture that puts itself above the flow, 
that thinks it can reorder events to suit its purpose-"
    "I can do things," Noah blurted out. "I can make events have consequences. I 
plant seeds and they grow."
    That was a mistake, Noah realized. He should learn to keep his mouth shut. 
That way he learned a lot more. This way, he attracted everyone's attention.
    Sure enough, Kathy started to say it was his bedtime-
    Fortunately, Aaron broke in. "You're right," he said softly and reached over 
and rubbed Noah's back. "You do have some power to take new things happen, 
because you weren't part of the time we're rolling back on. But so far, as best 
as we can tell, your power-and Alicia's-is strictly local."
    "And seeds are living systems," Kathy said.
    "I know," Noah replied. "We can do things with living systems. All of us. 
And I can make other things happen here too, inside the ship, but anything that 
I try to do outside the ship-like sending out a test marker-is gone the next 
minute too."
    "Right," Aaron said, "because those markers are subject to the ship's 
backward displacement in time."
    "I know," Noah repeated. "I understand. But here's what I was thinking 
about: I could go out in one of our shuttles. Since I wasn't part of your trip 
out here-we're past the part of space where I was born, right?-don't you think I 
could control some more things from that shuttle? Because I wouldn't be part of 
our ship's backward, uhm..."
    "Space-time field," Jack said.
    "Yeah," Noah said.
    "Out of the question," Kathy said.
    "You might have more control out there," Aaron said, "and then again, you 
might just disappear. Because that's not your time. Here, the ship's internal 
temporal field-comprised in part of our own living processes-seems to protect 
you. I know, it's complicated, and we don't fully understand all of it yet 
either. But that's what your mother, and all of us, would be worried about if 
you left this ship."
    "And also," Jack said, "why would you even want to try that? Our rollback is 
going fine just as it is-we're right on course back to Earth, to the instant we 
first left on our voyage."
    "I don't know," Noah said. "I guess I want to find out what I could do out 
there, free of this ship. The Light Through is the only place I've ever known-I 
really have no idea what's going to happen to us when we return."
    Aaron said: "You're right about that. I think we all feel that way."
    "Out of the question," Kathy said again.


    They finally agreed to a limited shuttle jaunt from the ship, with Hiro as 
well as Noah aboard. The shuttle went about 100,000 miles, then suddenly bounced 
back to the ship-"like a rubber band contracting," Hiro kept saying-though he 
was pumping the shuttle in the opposite direction.
    "The ship's space-time field is too strong," Aaron said to Jack and Kathy, 
when they thought Noah was asleep in the next room. "The shuttle couldn't 
overcome our reverse momentum. Could be Hiro's connection to the past is 
stronger than Noah's freedom from reverse, or maybe Noah's freedom just doesn't 
extend beyond this ship."
    The ship had an area, a field-both inside it and a certain unknown distance 
around it-that was traveling back with it to the past, Aaron reasoned. 
Everything in that field was part of the time rollback. But it was even more 
complicated, because in addition to the ship's field, Aaron thought people on 
the ship had their own reverse-flowing fields around them too. Everyone except 
Noah partially and Alicia completely-because Noah wasn't around for half of the 
trip out, and Alicia wasn't at all. Except now Noah's was probably completely 
gone too, because the ship was way past the point in deep space where he was 
born. So: Noah goes with Hiro on a shuttle in a direction away from the ship, 
trying to break loose of the ship's reverse pull if he can. They go a fair 
distance, and then: pop, they snap right back to the ship. Probably because the 
combination of the ship's backward pull along with Hiro's outweighed Noah's if 
it still existed.
    "Inconclusive," Jack agreed.
    "How's this gonna end?" Aaron asked. "I feel like we're prisoners of this 
process. We get back to Mars Vestibule the instant that we left. The sixteen 
years that have just passed for us traveling at half the speed of light, out to 
Alpha Centauri and back, haven't happened yet for anyone else, haven't happened 
for the nonliving systems on this ship. And then what? Every message that we've 
sent, every bit of evidence on this ship, is gone? I just can't fathom our 
situation when this ends."
    "We've been over this already," Jack said. "Recorded scientific evidence 
isn't the only kind of evidence."
    "We have Noah and Alicia," Kathy said.
    "Naomi can say we smuggled them on the ship," Aaron said.
    "DNA evidence will prove that they're ours-yours and mine and Roger's," 
Kathy retorted. "None of us knew the other that long before the voyage."
    "That won't prove a thing to Naomi," Aaron said. "Maybe you nd I had a 
torrid affair eight years before the voyage; maybe Roger and you were secret 
lovers four years before that. There's no way we can prove to Naomi that we 
never met each other back then, that we were away together in space for sixteen 
years."
    "We'll look older," Kathy said.
    "Naomi could say we had plastic surgery to make us look that way," Aaron 
responded.
    "That woman can say anything she wants," Jack weighed in. "But Noah and 
Alicia are indeed the key. We've got to look to them for our answers."
    "I'd feel happier about that if we had some indication of the kids' 
survivability off this ship, on their own, without someone like Hiro connected 
to the past, protected by it," Aaron said.
    "Don't even think about it," Kathy said. "We're not sending Noah or Alicia 
out on any shuttle without an adult on board."
    "Once we get back to Sol," Aaron continued, "Noah and Alicia will have to 
live off this ship, in a time in which they never existed."
    "You'll frighten him if he hears you say that," Kathy said.


    Getting past Bo and Nikki's security rigs three nights later was child's 
play for Noah, even though he couldn't remember ever feeling like a child. He 
had the shuttle fueled and coursed and ready to go within an hour. The false 
readings he'd programmed into the central system would tell anyone who scanned 
his quarters that he was sound asleep in bed. And the shuttle's readings would 
say it was in stasis.
    But he intended to take this shuttle just beyond where Hiro and he had been, 
and keep it there for two days. That would prove to Aaron and everyone that Noah 
had real freedom from this ship. He knew that would make Aaron happy. Aaron was 
worried that the kids wouldn't survive this voyage, but Noah would prove to him 
that they could.
    Noah initiated the final computer check and launch sequence. He took a sip 
of orange juice. The computer purred in his ear that everything was all right, 
then-
    A screech nearly punctured his eardrums. It was some kind of alarm. He 
called up visual-someone else was in the shuttle bay!
    Damnit! Noah jabbed a key to stop the launch, got out of his seat, nd opened 
the shuttle hatch. He'd been so careful to make sure no one had followed him.
    He walked slowly out the door, ready with an explanation. There'd be hell to 
pay for this with his mother....
    "Mommy's gonna be very angry at you," a voice said.
    "Alicia, get out of here," Noah said. "It's way past your bedtime. You 
should be sleeping."
    "You should be too," Alicia said.
    OK, Noah had to be calm about this. No point in screaming at a six-year-old. 
"Look, I have something really important I have to do here tonight. And it's 
important that Mom doesn't know about it. Can I count on you to keep this 
secret? Please?"
    "Mommy says you'll die if you go out there," Alicia said breathlessly.
    Noah laughed. "That's ridiculous. You know Mom-she overreacts about 
everything."
    "What's 'over carrots'?" Alicia asked.
    "Well, you know-she always says things will be worse than they really are. 
Like when she says you'll get high blood pressure when you're older if you don't 
eat lots of carrots now."
    Alicia smiled. "Or when she yells that your brain will rot away from playing 
too much virtel?"
    "Right," Noah said. "So you shouldn't really listen to her when she says 
this is dangerous." He pointed to the shuttle, its door open and inviting. "It's 
nice and safe in there."
    A big mistake.
    Alicia's eyes seemed to open even wider. She looked at the shuttle and the 
viewscreen beyond for a long time.
    "Can I come too?" she asked.
    "No!" Noah said. "I mean, it's perfectly safe and all, but you're not even 
six yet."
    "So?"
    "So that means Mom needs you here on the ship." But Noah realized what he 
was saying wasn't very convincing. Maybe he should take Alicia along after 
all.... That would keep this a secret long enough to let them leave. And if what 
Aaron was saying was right, having Alicia on the shuttle would give it another 
person who wasn't tied to the past. She was a pain lots of the time, but she 
came from even less f the rolled-back time than Noah. Maybe her field, or 
whatever it was, could be just what they needed to break away....
    But he still didn't want to take her. And it wasn't just because he was 
afraid she'd get some of the glory.
    Noah had to admit that maybe it was because deep inside he believed there 
was a tiny little chance that the shuttle would never return from this hop. Or 
maybe return with its passengers dead.
    He didn't want to die. He didn't want his little sister to die.
    Noah opened the outside panel on the shuttle and poked in the seal-up and 
return-to-stasis sequence. The lights went off inside.
    "What are we gonna do now?" Alicia asked.
    "We're going back to bed." And he took Alicia's hand and they walked out the 
door and quickly down the halls....
    Noah slid under the covers and closed his eyes, and ruefully remembered what 
he'd heard Jack say lots of times about this ship.
    She was like Mother Earth. She didn't want you to ever leave her.











Thirteen


    Jack
    

    It's like running down the stairs, Jack thought, something he hadn't done, 
come to think of it, since he'd first stepped onto this starship.
    You can't really focus on each stair, can't really think about what you're 
doing, or you'll trip and break your neck.
    That was Aaron and him. Jack never thought much about their relationship, he 
just did it, and that's probably why it worked. Running down the stairs. Though 
sometimes plotting to get a hold of their future, to survive, felt more like 
running up a huge staircase. Or maybe up an endless down-escalator ...
    Their conversation today in Aaron's office had certainly hit a down note. 
"I'm not afraid of dying," Aaron said. "I've been prepared for that from the 
beginning. If the Russell-Shaw effect gives me another twenty good years, I'll 
grab them. Bertrand Russell was boffing 'em practically into his nineties, and 
had all of his marbles, and George Bernard Shaw was sharp as a whip until then 
too. I'm not crazy, I like the taste of life. But if it ends a little sooner 
that's OK too. High eighties is a good life. A little short by today's 
standards, true, but what the hell do standards count for in our situation? And 
let's face it, by the standards I grew up with-you and I grew up with, Jack-by 
those standards, knocking on ninety years ain't bad." His hand was shaking as he 
pulled a teacup to his mouth. His teeth looked more yellow than Jack remembered 
them, but who could recall the last time he'd looked t Aaron's teeth? Likely due 
more to tannic acid than age.
    "I know," Jack said.
    "It's the kids," Aaron said.
    "I know," Jack said. They had been worrying for years about what would 
happen to the kids. Jack guessed all the people on the ship had, in their own 
ways. There were no exits from the children's voyage that didn't promise to be 
painful.
    "I can see them just... blanking out of existence when we get back to Mars," 
Aaron continued. "Somehow, as long as we're on this ship, we have enough ... I 
don't know, enough presence of our journey out. Enough of that field remains for 
Noah and Alicia to live. To flourish. But once the time rollback is complete 
..."
    "We can't be sure what will happen," Jack said.
    "But every other scrap of what we accomplished on this trip is long gone 
now," Aaron said. "All of our records, our data files, our physical evidence. 
All we have are our recollections. Our children. How can they buck that stream? 
I don't see how they'll fit, how they can exist, in a world in which they never 
belonged."
    "They're strong," Jack replied. "I mean, their life forces are strong." But 
he understood Aaron. This time rollback may have been a vindication of 
Jack's-Wise Oak's-vision, but it was no less a grave danger to the children, for 
just the reasons Aaron was saying.
    "Yeah, strong," Aaron said, "but stronger than time itself? I don't even 
know what that means."
    "What's the alternative?" Jack asked. "Setting them loose in a shuttle? 
That's why I was thought-playing with the idea of letting Noah go out for a 
jaunt on his own last week." Jack also knew about Noah's and Alicia's 
near-launch on Tuesday-a little birdie named Alicia had told him. But she made 
him promise not to tell anyone, and Jack always made a point of keeping his 
promises-the younger the children he gave them to, especially. And he saw no 
value in burdening Aaron any further now.
    "No, that's not the answer," Aaron said. "That's no less risky to the kids 
than our Sol reunion. We have no idea what might happen to them out there."
    "What's the answer then?"
    "Living things aren't yet affected by this backward arrow," Aaron aid. 
"Let's say we drastically increased the biomass, the lifebulk, on the ship-that 
might throw us off course a bit."
    "Increase the biomass? How? By impregnating all the women?" Jack smiled.
    He was glad to see a slight, return gleam in Aaron's eyes. Good, he hadn't 
lost his sense of humor.
    "We'll be in our solar system in two years-not enough time to produce enough 
babies to make a difference," Aaron said. "No, I was thinking of something a 
little lower down the scale-like getting Hiro to get the plants to run amuck."
    "Balloon the biomass with plant life, and this might somehow alter the time 
rollback?" Jack asked.
    "We're being sucked back into the mouth of time-the belly of time-who the 
hell knows," Aaron said. "I'm saying that if our biomass-the only damned thing 
we seem to have any influence over here-can be made to explosively increase, 
maybe it will give this time-snake an upset stomach, and it'll spit us out."
    "To where?" Jack asked.
    "I don't know," Aaron said.
    "I've got to hand it to you," Jack said. "You spend the first half of the 
voyage telling Bo and company not to worry-that against all odds, we'll find a 
way to get home. And now that that's coming true, you want to figure out a way 
to spit us out again into space?"
    "You afraid your theory will be proven wrong?"
    Jack shook his head. Noah and Alicia meant more to him than all the theories 
in this universe, Wise Oak's included. That's what Jack's science and his spirit 
taught. That the living always deserve our best attention. "Bo and Nikki won't 
go for it. They'll say the safest thing for the kids is to get them back to 
Earth. And they could well be right."
    "We don't need Bo and Nikki to do this," Aaron said. "Just Hiro."
    "Then why are you telling me?" Jack asked.
    "Same reason as always," Aaron replied. "I value your counsel."


    A cool, stiff breeze cut through Hiro's garden. It took Jack by surprise-it 
always did; the ecoengineering always caught him off-guard and delighted him-and 
he shivered with pleasure.
    Hiro smiled up at Aaron and Jack. He held a new type of glistening string 
bean in his hand. "Strange to say," he stood up and extended his other hand, 
first to Aaron and then to Jack, "but I'm going to miss this place when we 
return to Earth."
    "How come?" Aaron asked.
    "Control," Hiro said. "Here on this ship I have much more control over my 
environment, over my food species, than I could in any lab or farm back on 
Earth. Here I'm a Charles Darwin and a Luther Burbank and a Joichi Takada all 
rolled into one."
    "You're better than those guys," Jack said. "They encouraged people to stomp 
all over their original environments. You're more constructive- you cooperate 
with the species you find."
    A tinge of annoyance darkened Aaron's eyes. Jack had seen it before-what's 
Jack doing airing his damned politics at a time like this?-but Jack understood. 
Aaron couldn't help himself. And what Jack said to Hiro would make him better 
disposed to hear Aaron's request. Not to mention that it was also true.
    "Thank you." Hiro bowed slightly in the body language that remained his 
people's. "But the truth is, I have very far to go to really surpass Darwin or 
Burbank, let alone Takada. He turned the huge Arab deserts into breadbaskets 
with his sea-watered wheat. I've done much less here." He gestured to his 
garden.
    "But as you say, many things are possible on a starship," Jack said, "many 
things in this closed, floating world in which you have such full coevolutionary 
control."
    Hiro nodded. "I appreciate the irony of a control that is fully 
Co-evolutionary-completely a partnership-but I'm getting the feeling that this 
is more than a visit to inspect my new string beans and compliment my 
complementary philosophy."
    "Yes," Aaron said. "We wanted to ask you how you would feel about trying to 
do something to stop our return to Earth."
    Hiro laughed. "You're joking, right?"
    "This whole trip has often felt like a joke to me," Jack said. "But, no, 
we're quite serious. We're concerned that to return to Earth and take Noah and 
Alicia off this ship might be to take them out of existence, because they were 
not part of the time-space in our solar system to which we'll return-they didn't 
exist anywhere then. They had no status in any realm on Earth or Mars Vestibule 
when our voyage began, except possibly the potential."
    "If the reverse time flow ends when we get back to Earth-and why shouldn't 
it?-then the field on this ship will end too," Aaron added. "And that may be all 
that's keeping the children alive now."
    "But if we don't go back to Earth, where will we go?" Hiro asked. "Back to 
Alpha Centauri? What's for us there? We found nothing but inexplicable paradox 
there. And we don't have enough fuel to go anywhere else."
    "True," Aaron said.
    "And we can't know for sure that the children will disappear when we get 
back to Earth-that's just speculation, like everything else," Hiro said. "So if 
we do something to interfere with our return, we may be risking everyone's life 
on this ship, including the children's, for no reason."
    "That's true too," Aaron said.
    "And besides," Hiro said, "I don't think we can actually do anything to 
prevent our return-we seem totally in the grip of the reverse-time tide."
    "That may not be entirely true," Aaron said, and proceeded to tell Hiro his 
biomass notion, allowing how "a million more string beans might derail the train 
of time."
    Hiro sighed. "For myself, I might chance it; it has its appeal," he said. "I 
have no real connections back on Earth-no wife or kids, my parents disapproved 
of this trip-and I've grown in many unexpected ways in my years on our ship. 
Mostly, I've come to see that the microcosms I tend to inside this ship are not 
so different from the worlds and suns outside-a breeze carries feathered seeds 
in here, a ship carries human ideas out there. I wouldn't mind playing cosmic 
gardener some more and going back out to the stars. But to make that decision 
for others-the rest of us on this ship-that's something else. Something I'd need 
to think more about."
    Jack started to respond, but Aaron put his hand on Hiro's shoulder. "That's 
OK," Aaron said softly. "Your position is moral and I respect it. I just wanted 
to raise this issue with you now and see how you felt. We'll talk about it 
again. And I give you my word we won't do anything to disrupt the voyage behind 
your or anyone's back."
    "Thank you," Hiro said, and bowed.


    "You're still full of surprises," Jack said to Aaron as they walked back 
down the corridor.
    "I realized something as I was making my point to Hiro," Aaron 
said-"something about the words we were using near the end of the conversation. 
Words can be very instructive."
    "Oh?"
    "You sometimes drive me crazy the way you use words. I wish I could get you 
to just tell me point-blank what your thoughts are on these crucial 
issues-they're only a matter of life and death-rather than my having to tweeze 
them out of you," Aaron said. "You've probably been trying to tell me about my 
insight with Hiro for a while now-it feels like something that would have 
already occurred to you."
    "I've found it better to sketch a road," Jack said, "and let you walk a bit 
upon it yourself. That way you discover it on your own terms, rather than mine 
or someone else's. That way you bring your own perspective to the new idea, a 
fresh stimulus to its growth."
    "Jack Lumet, Native American epistemologist," Aaron said.
    "At your service," Jack said, and bowed. It was catching. "So tell me about 
your-our-insight."
    "It has to do with the difference between trains and tides," Aaron said. 
"Hiro said we were moving on a reverse-time tide; I said we were on a train."
    "Not surprising," Jack said, "in view of Hiro's being a naturalist and your 
being a philosopher of technology."
    "Right," Aaron said, "but tides and trains have different properties. A 
train gets to its destination-whether initial or return trip-and can stay there, 
indefinitely, ever after. But the very essence of the tide is that, once it's 
arrived, it begins moving back in the direction from which it came."
    "Back and forth forever," Jack said.
    "How long have you been on to this?" Aaron asked.
    The thought had occurred to Jack the instant he realized that they had 
reversed their course in the Alpha Centauri system. The ancient peoples he'd 
studied back on Earth had understood well the two-way, eternal nature of the 
tides-that rivers which flowed both ways continued to flow both ways.
    "A while," Jack replied. "But like Hiro said, it's just another theory, 
another conjecture. I'd be surprised if it weren't the case, but there's still a 
near-infinity of information that we don't have about our situation. And I'm not 
clear how this affects the picture for the children." And you, old friend, were 
having enough trouble grasping even the return flow of the tide from Alpha 
Centauri to Earth at first, Jack thought. But that's OK. Nothing about this trip 
was easy to grasp.
    "But the point is that if we increase our lifebulk," Aaron said, "we may 
well disrupt our natural counterreturn current-if that's what's happening-rather 
than promote it. More biomass in the river could split up the current into a 
thousand smaller streams, whatever that would mean for us."
    "Yes," Jack said. "Or the increased biomass could make the current even 
stronger, and result in our overshooting the return to Sol. Who knows where we'd 
wind up, and what that would do to the counter-return."
    "Yet you went with me to Hiro and supported my presentation of the biomass 
option to him," Aaron said.
    "Yes," Jack said. "Because you were right to at least raise that option to 
him, in case we need it. And because I knew there was no chance he would agree 
just like that."
    "OK," Aaron said, "so we have an option-increased biomass. But its 
disruption of our back-and-forth flow pattern-if it disrupts the pattern, if 
that pattern is in fact in operation here-has too many possible consequences to 
fathom. And we're not even sure if the circumstances that option might 
shatter-our return to Earth-are good or bad, at least for the kids."
    "But you do want to keep the kids away from a complete remerging with 
Earth," Jack said. "We're operating now on the possibility that a return to 
Earth could kill the kids, aren't we?"
    "I want them to live," Aaron said simply.
    "The biomass option could well keep us from Earth," Jack said.
    "But if we let things take their natural course," Aaron said and shook his 
head-"natural is about the last word I feel like using here- but if we let this 
proceed without intervention, without a biomass insert, then we would likely be 
in touch with Earth for just the most fleeting instant, the instant our journey 
first began, before the current reverses itself and we're back here on our way 
out again. That's the way tides work, don't they? The water begins to recede a 
split second after high tide. Just an instant delivery, and back to the sea 
again. The slightest of kisses in time," he mused.
    "That could be one way it would happen, yes," Jack said. "The dividing line 
between changes of tide is infinitesimal."
    "And the ship's field might well be able to survive such infinitesimal 
contact. A single starlit heartbeat. The kids might be able to survive it..."
    "The biomass option is probably still a more likely way of avoiding Earth 
altogether," Jack said. "Let's not lose sight of that."
    "I know, I know." Aaron clenched and unclenched his jaw, in the unconscious 
chewing Jack had seen him do for seventy years when struggling with strong 
emotions. "But I don't want to intervene if there's a chance that leaving things 
alone will work out. Interventions have unforeseen consequences. I've done 
enough intervention on this trip already," Aaron added.
    This whole trip was intervention. That was the way of science and the West. 
Poke reality in the eye, see if it waters or glares back at you. Learn by 
perturbation. But Jack had to admire Aaron's sense of caution and proportion 
now. Jack realized, as he often did, that for a Eurostyle philosopher, Aaron had 
a keen awareness of the cosmic order of things, and when to leave those workings 
alone.
    "So we do nothing for the time being?" Jack asked.
    "I think that's right," Aaron said. "Yes. We keep our minds open for any 
change, for any glint of information that might be relevant. And we stand ready 
to try to disrupt our course, if need be, to take our case to Hiro again or 
whatever, at a moment's notice. But for now, at least until we understand more 
of what this rollback is, we do nothing to interfere with its progress. Does 
that seem right to you?"
    Jack nodded, and squeezed his friend's shoulder.


    A trickle of sweet saliva tickled Jack's chest. It was not from his mouth, 
but Nikki's, who lay sound asleep on him. He traced some unknown fractal design 
on her lips with the tip of his finger.
    She said she was a private person. She didn't want anyone to know about the 
two of them. They'd gotten together after Bo's return from the hulk-he was a 
changed man, Nikki had said, coiled inside himself n a way that left no more 
room for her-but she didn't want her relationship with Jack to go public. That's 
the way she had played it with Bo as well.
    Fine with Jack. He'd never been one to wrap a woman around his neck like a 
trophy pelt.
    Who knows, maybe she thought she had a pipeline of information from him 
about Aaron. She could hope what she pleased.
    For Jack's part, he had no problem distinguishing his semen from his spirit. 
The latter was sacred. No sighs in his ear, no thighs touching his could ever 
possibly move his spirit to compromise a friend-let alone a lifelong friend like 
Aaron.
    Jack knew that most people misunderstood him-mistook his love for the North 
American Indian as a romance with Rousseau's noble savage. But that wasn't it. 
Jack's path was neither noble nor savage.
    The Iroquois saw a river-a river so close to the powerful tide of an ocean 
that the ocean's salt and sweat went up more than halfway to Albany, New York. 
And then back again. And up again. Flowing both ways.
    What did those people know of the stars? Was it more than what they saw from 
Earth? Did they somehow actually travel to Alpha Centauri and back, and discover 
that the space-time fabric that held Sol and Alpha Centauri together also 
undulated back and forth, like Muhheakunnuk, the River of Steep Hills, the River 
That Flowed Both Ways, the Hudson?
    Highly unlikely, of course.
    But who was Jack to deny it with 100 percent assurance?
    He hadn't been there. At least, not before now.
    Maybe it was just a theory of the Iroquois. Was Wise Oak's idea- that the 
yawning stretches beyond our world somehow obeyed the same forces as a river 
thread within that world-somehow less impressive because it wasn't published in 
some scholarly journal and called fractal logic? Was an idea wrong just because 
it came from a thinker five hundred years prior to MIT, CalTech, the Technion, 
OmniTech, CzechTek, MetroTech, all the fine and wondrous techs of the new 
millennium?
    The modern world worshiped at the altar of empirical data-the myriad 
hard-as-zirconium facts that came from spotless, glittering equipment. Jack 
preferred to bow down and sniff the dirt of the past, o sift it with his hands 
and heart for an arrowhead that might point him in a better direction to 
understand.
    Had not the ancient Greeks-the heroes of Aaron's philosophy and science, the 
despoilers of the Iroquois world through their descendants, the Romans, and 
their European progeny-had not those Greeks managed to come up with an atomic 
theory, via a technology scarcely more developed than the Iroquois'?
    Aaron had found Jack's paper about the Iroquois and the stars on some 
pitted, backwater stretch of the Internet, and somehow Aaron had converted it 
into this ship. That was Aaron's special gift, his alchemy. Transform an idea 
into a starship. Magic. Aaron deserved all the credit.
    But Jack shared the blame. They had created a world in which not just their 
ideas were obliged to die if they were wrong, not even just them, but their 
children.
    Jack had never thought of children when the Light Through left Sol. He was 
stunned when he first learned that Kathy was pregnant with Roger's child-but he 
couldn't blame her. He felt the same need she did to gain some control over 
their realm, and children were a powerful way to do that. He'd likely have had 
some kids with Kathy himself if he were capable of more than just making love.
    He felt now as if Noah and Alicia were his children-the children not of his 
sperm but of his ideas, his Iroquois ideas.
    And yet those very ideas, implemented in the half-knowing fashion in which 
ideas usually are, had brought them to this juncture. Aaron was right to be 
worried. They were a long, long way from out of these woods....
    Jack fell asleep thinking that the chances were very slim indeed that they, 
their ideas, and their children would all manage to survive their rendezvous 
with Earth. Everything depended upon just how long that kiss in time would be.
    Nikki made a low, throaty sound, as if in agreement.











Fourteen


    Nikki
    

    Nikki slipped out of bed and into her clothes and out the door.
    She was glad Jack was still sleeping.
    She stopped at the Connected Cafe for a glass of strawberry-orange 
juice-straight from Hiro's latest gengineered crop-and a steaming blueberry 
muffin and a cup of coffee.
    She was glad no one else was there. She didn't feel like talking. She was on 
her way to see Roger.
    So much of what had happened on this trip was due to Roger McLaren. The 
truth is, he had begun acting crazy even before his jump to that damn planet 
around ACA. Sleeping with Kathy, OK. He was only human. He was a man. Didn't 
matter whether the bed was on Earth or a starship light-years away. But getting 
her pregnant? What was he thinking?
    Now Nikki held his hand. "So I bet you never expected to return to Earth a 
daddy," she said. This was the first conversation she'd had alone with him in 
months. She had tried one or another variation of this daddy opener lots of 
times, with no result.
    Today was no different.
    "Sure wish you could tell me something of what happened to you on that 
hulk."
    Same reply.
    Bo was no different. Neither man who had been to the hulk anted to talk 
about it. She guessed neither could. And that's why the truth of their situation 
likely was tied up in some way with that hulk.
    She sat there with Roger for maybe an hour, just holding his hand. She 
looked at the soft, shimmering walls-intelligent surfaces, maybe more 
intelligent than Roger now. No, not more intelligent, but more communicative. 
Millions of tiny chip panels that could combine in countless ways into larger 
panels that could show Nikki any part of the ship, hook her into any part of the 
ship's grand network, a second skin far more alive and tingling with knowledge 
than hers. She had designed all of this for Roger-and for what it could tell 
her-in the past few years.
    One thing the walls couldn't show her was the future-or past-or wherever the 
hell it was they were heading. In that respect, these highly intelligent walls 
were indeed as dumb as her own perspiring skin and everyone else's on this ship. 
As mute as McLaren.
    She often wondered if he ever came out of his shell and embraced these walls 
when he was alone at night. If he used them to confide his inner secrets, 
express his demons, entertain what was locking him up inside.
    She thought she would have-she would have tried to come out in the cupped 
hands of night, had she been like Roger. No one to hurt him then. Just these 
walls. But what did she really know about his condition?
    As far as Nikki could tell, Roger had said nothing to the walls-no more than 
he'd said to anyone on the ship. Perhaps he talked to the walls silently, with a 
flicker of the eyes so quick, a shift of the lips so subtle, that no other eyes 
could catch it. At any rate, Nikki's computer connections that gossiped with 
McLaren's walls had nothing to convey. If McLaren's walls had ears, they were 
deaf to McLaren. Ears that could hear might as well be deaf if the speaker was 
mute.
    "OK," Nikki said, "I'm gonna go now. We'll be back home on Earth soon. Just 
a few more years now. Maybe they'll know how to take care of you there."
    Out here, a few more years seemed soon.


    For Nikki's money, Kathy was by far the strangest person on the ship- and 
that was saying a lot, because the Light Through was crawling with weirdos 
everywhere you looked. She guessed that was to be expected. Who else but a 
nutcase would volunteer for a mission based on a scientific theory derived from 
an Indian? Or on a boomerang that had worked around the sun and the moon, at a 
sliver of the distance between Sol and ACA? But Kathy-that girl was in a class 
by herself.
    Nikki found Kathy in the conference room, going over their final report on 
the grand QM phenomenon. Nikki had finally worked out an automatic, perpetual 
data copying process with Aviva-the idea was it generated a new copy just as the 
previous one was lapsing into oblivion in the time rollback. Didn't do much good 
for images, which went into overwhelming noise-to-signal ratio after the eighth 
copy. But so far, so good for just plain text. "I'm happy with it," Kathy said 
about their report, "but I doubt that anyone back on Earth will pay much 
attention to it now, even if it lasts the distance. No one cares about 
explanations for events that never took place."
    "Well, sure," Nikki said, "but they did take place. The fact that we have no 
evidence of them now doesn't mean that they didn't take-"
    "No," Kathy said. "We're really back in an earlier time now, before the 
events that we describe in our report happened. The fact that our lives and our 
minds still flow from that future doesn't change the fact that that future 
hasn't yet occurred in a physical sense, and may never occur. The physical space 
around us is literally as it was almost sixteen years ago-you know that; all of 
your equipment and readings are saying that-and that's because the physical, 
material realm that we're in, other than the lives and thoughts on this ship, is 
almost sixteen years ago."
    Nikki shook her head in disagreement. "You remember when Newark Freenet 
crashed, fifteen years before we left?" she asked.
    "No," Kathy said.
    "Well, I was just a kid then, but I remember what happened. The crash was so 
bad that the only way they could fix it was to roll the on-line database back 
two weeks. So the next time I signed on, it's like it was two weeks 
earlier-everything after that was gone. The date was two weeks earlier, the 
newest messages were two weeks earlier, everything. But the reality, of course, 
the truth is that it was really two weeks later. It's just that on that 
database, the two weeks hadn't happened yet."
    "This isn't a database." Kathy gestured to the real-view window at the far 
end of the room. "This is reality itself. That's the difference."
    "But you don't know that," Nikki insisted. "You can't know that for sure. 
It's just as likely that there's an ultimate reality beyond what we're now going 
through, a core of reality in which our memories of the future are memories of 
events that did occur-will occur-"
    "When?" Kathy asked. "You planning on going back to Alpha Centauri any time 
soon?"
    "Well, no," Nikki admitted. She hadn't intended this to be so intense, but 
it was just as well. You learned more from intensities than superficial 
pleasantries.
    "So you're saying that you're holding out some hope that our time rollback 
isn't what it is?" Kathy asked. "That somehow we'll live happily ever after back 
on Earth, with scientific recognition for what we discovered in the stars, with 
everything business as usual, all supported by some kind of ultimate, deeper 
reality? Everything falling neatly into place, as if there were no time 
rollback, and everyone on Earth aware that we'd been gone for sixteen years, 
aware of where we'd gone? That's what you want?"
    "Yeah," Nikki said. "Don't you?"
    "What we want is not necessarily what we get," Kathy said.
    "So what are you telling me?"
    "I'm telling you that what you want can't possibly be," Kathy said. "We 
can't return to Earth and be as we are when the Earth we return to is still 
sixteen years in the were. Something has to give. I don't know what. Maybe our 
minds rather than our lives, if we're lucky-if being like Roger is lucky. I 
don't know. But I do know we can't just squeeze lives and minds back into a 
sixteen-year-old tube of toothpaste. For all we know, our very return to Earth 
will cause the whole time-space structure to explode."
    "You worrying about the whole universe now?" Nikki asked. But she realized 
Kathy was probably worrying most about her kids, which for a mother would 
understandably be most of her universe.
    "Everything," Kathy said, "I'm worried about everything."
    "Look, we have no way of preventing this ship from going back to Earth," 
Nikki said. "And even if we did, where else would we go? You want your kids to 
spend their lives riding around the galaxy, until we all die off and they're the 
only ones left on this ship?"
    "I don't want them to die the year after next, I know that," Kathy said. 
"But you're right-this whole discussion is hypothetical. There's nothing we can 
do to stop this anyway."
    Sure, tell me another story....
    Bo was right about these people. They had something they were working on, 
something about not going back to Earth, something that Kathy was glad and 
tormented about at the same time-some kind of last hope that she couldn't be 
sure would turn out right, something that of course they didn't talk about 
outside of their inner circle....
    What were they after? Who would choose life in a vacuum for even a chance to 
live again back on Earth?
    She'd have to keep a careful eye on them.
    Just as Naomi had urged about Aaron and Jack in that briefing she'd given 
some of the crew the week before they'd left.


    Hiro was one person Nikki thought she could trust-not because she thought 
him absolutely trustworthy (she didn't know anyone she had that kind of faith 
in, including herself), but because he hadn't been part of the inner circle at 
first. That self-anointed inner circle... No, Hiro was just a short-order 
nutritionist long on good sense. He owed nothing to anything except his own 
talent.
    "Nikki." He greeted her with a handful of string beans he had just picked 
from his garden. They looked a little too shiny for Nikki's taste-she was still 
partial to the dull-green things her grandma used to grow in her Southside lot.
    "You perfecting your plants for reception on Earth?" she asked.
    "Yes," he said. "Living things come through the time strain. The more we 
have, the more we can show what we've been doing these past years."
    "Time strain, I like that," Nikki said.
    "I mean time strainer," Hiro said, embarrassed. "You know-the backward roll 
takes out nonliving material, not life or thoughts, because life and thoughts 
are antientropic. They always go against the flow of decay, whether time is 
moving forward or backward. So I think of what we're going through now as a 
strainer. And what's left after the straining are life and thoughts."
    "Strainer's good too," Nikki said. "You're nearly as good with words as you 
are with vegetables."
    He smiled, and bowed slightly.
    "You think we're going to make it, then-back to Earth," Nikki said.
    He lost his smile and stood up straight. "Why shouldn't we?"
    "Lots of things can go wrong before we get there," Nikki answered. "Lots of 
things can go wrong when we get there. Kathy's afraid that, in the end, the time 
of sixteen years ago might not be able to accept us when we return-I mean 
physically-that space-time could unravel, explode, at the instant we try to 
reintegrate with it."
    "But we've seen no sign of that on our ship," Hiro said, "and we're 
traveling back in time right now."
    "Yeah," Nikki said, "but that could be because we're also traveling at half 
the speed of light, or because we're actually moving back now in time. Kathy's 
fear is that when the process is complete, it could result in our... being 
erased." Great, she was explaining this so well she was beginning to feel some 
of the raw anxiety herself.
    "There are infinite possibilities," Hiro said. "Why focus on one particular 
horrible one?"
    "Well, there may be a lot of possibilities, but in the end we have just an 
either-or choice-try our best to return to Earth, or not-and we can know which 
of those two directions to choose only by examining as many of the infinite 
possibilities as possible."
    "You're wrong," Hiro said. "We have no choice at all. Our knowledge means 
nothing in this."
    Nikki looked at him, taken aback by his uncustomary bluntness.
    "What control have we had over anything in this whole voyage?" he continued. 
"From the minute we started, what choice did we really have? Our trip to the 
star was one surprise after another. And our trip back has nothing to do with 
any choice we made. It should be clear to everyone by now that our fate is in 
hands that have never touched ours."
    "Whose hands?"
    "Unknown," Hiro said.
    "Yet you grow your string beans," Nikki pressed.
    "If we get back to Earth, they'll be good evidence. If not, they'll be good 
to eat wherever we are. And, anyway," he smiled, "they give me pleasure right 
now, whatever happens later."
    But Nikki knew her pleasure was far less easily obtained.











Fifteen


    Roger
    

    "Maybe they'll know how to take care of you there," Nikki said, and walked 
out of my skins-out of the space between the middle skin of my body and the 
outer skin of my walls-out into the halls that were nobody's skins at all.
    I have a great interest in skins, in boundaries, in realms within realms. I 
once heard Aaron talking about McLuhan-I was attracted to the name because it 
sounded like mine. He had a view that a fish was the last being you should ask 
about certain properties of water, because the fish was totally submerged in it 
and had no sense of its boundaries, where the water began and the water ended. 
Don't ask a fish about the intersection of water with land and air. Even if it 
could talk, all it could really tell you about land and air is the death gasp of 
a fish out of water.
    I was even worse than the fish. In so deep and out the other side that 
boundaries themselves were my water. Gasping, writhing, slapping my being on 
some shore as I struggled for a breath of unattainable understanding. Just a 
breath...
    I'm not sure what that really means, but it feels right to me. I'm not even 
sure that words convey my meaning anymore-I use them only because they once 
worked for me, and I hear them still from people I know.
    These words-my think words-have nothing to do with the words I sometimes 
say. Those words, my say words, are the twitching of a muscle long gone slack. 
They have nothing to do with the me inside my inner skin. I think they once had 
some connection to something I once understood, but I'm not sure. I could be 
wrong. Or I could've been wrong when I thought I was once understanding 
something.
    I once was in a place where I saw so much, so fast, that I wanted to tell 
everyone. That's truly what I wanted. But they put too much pressure on me, the 
people on our ship that I wanted to talk to. I'm not angry at them. It wasn't 
their fault-they had no idea that I even had anything to tell them. But I could 
feel their need-tell me, tell me, tell me. I could feel their need to know 
clawing in my mind. I could feel it tugging at me all the time. And I knew also 
that I would never be able to answer properly.
    For seeing is not understanding-it's gasping, not breathing.
    The whole thing happened in maybe just a few seconds. I shut me off. It was 
the only way I could live.


    Warm hands over mine-I can feel the warmth radiating deep into me, through 
skin, flesh, bone, most layers indifferent to it, some grateful, until it gets 
to the deepest part of me, where it licks the nerve like a cat's tongue on a 
glacier.
    Kathy's talking... "Aaron and Jack think there's a good chance we won't 
actually remerge with Earth-we'll be sucked out on another trip back to Alpha 
Centauri the instant we return."
    No news. It's been going on for a long time....
    "I'm mostly relieved about it-I couldn't see how the kids would fit in; the 
time and place wouldn't be theirs. At least on our ship, they'll have a chance."
    Yeah. The pious hope of every soul who's ever been on our ship.
    "I'm still worried about the actual reversal point, though-the instant we 
shift from back time to normal, forward time, and start our journey back to 
Centauri. I won't breathe easily until we're actually past that."
    Even then you shouldn't. If Naomi Senzer had even an inkling of hat was 
going on-of the insane socket we'd plugged into-she'd get JFC to send a dozen 
warheads out to hit us as we left. I'm not sure I'd completely blame her, 
either.


    Sometimes I have lunch with Alicia in Hiro's garden.
    She talks to me.
    "I made three wishes at the well but I can't tell you what they are." She 
giggled. Splashes of joy in the space-time continuum. "I'm just like you now."
    The spider's web of words. This little angel had made three wishes-all of 
which were that I could talk to her, I bet-but she couldn't talk to me about 
them or they wouldn't come true. I couldn't talk because too much was true 
already.
    Alicia tugged on my hand. "See? That's a picture of the forest, and here's 
the tree where we're sitting." She had scratched out in the black dirt a 
reasonable sketch of where we were, with a big twig standing in for the oak tree 
we were leaning against.
    I picked up a little twig and a tiny twig from outside the sketch area. I 
bent the little twig in half and propped it up against the big, upright twig. 
Then I bent the tiny twig in half, and put it in the lap of the little twig.
    Alicia jumped into my lap and hugged me.


    Bo was still the biggest danger. Not that he or anyone would have much 
control over what would happen, but he was still the worst factor on board. Not 
because he was selfish-everyone is selfish in his or her way; even Albert 
Schweitzer did what he did because it gave him personal satisfaction-but because 
Bo had seen something on the hulk.
    He's come to see me again now, along with Nikki. Nikki's beau Bo. Bo bo 
bubbly bubbles...
    "McLaren," he says, and it sounds like it always does from his mouth, like a 
cough or a curse.
    "I know the pain you're suffering, my friend. Don't worry; when we get back 
to Earth you'll have plenty of important people to look at you. Big 
men-specialists. They'll know how to make you better."
    If I could speak, I'd say: You're not my friend. You never were and never 
will be. Just because you share a tiny drop of my insanity-of what made me this 
way-doesn't mean by the standards of any universe that you're my friend.
    Perhaps he senses what I'm feeling. Because to Nikki he says, "I still get 
the feeling he doesn't like me-like we're what, criminals? I'm a criminal 
because I want to go back to Earth, to our planet. Talk about ass-backward 
consequences of this time rollback!"
    Nikki puts a calming hand on his shoulder.
    "We just want to live, McLaren, we just want to live," he continues. "That's 
all. I know you don't like me. Try to see beyond that. Think about it. That's 
all."
    And they're walking out the door.
    "I know what you're afraid of." Bo's head is back in for a brief refrain, 
whispering. "I'm trying to prevent that from happening, goddamnit. Why can't you 
see that?" He's sounding out each important word like I'm some kind of imbecile. 
"Think about it, McLaren, think about it. That's all."
    And he's gone.
    Believe me, I've thought about it. And it doesn't matter.
    But if I could have talked, I'd have asked them what exactly were they so 
afraid anyone would do to change things?
    The illusion Bo and Nikki had that anything could be changed was touching-so 
strong, so at variance with reality that the whiff it left in my room was 
intoxicating.
    If only I could change what I'd ingested on that hulk.
    Age so old, so worn from repeated use, that the very quarks of creation 
peered through like shredded skin beneath a derelict's shiny pants leg. No 
wonder some faint, odd signal had come from that direction. No wonder the hulk 
scanned as an alien construction--time in that quantity, times the radiation of 
the universe, would do that to any alloy. How many times had that hulk traveled 
back and forth, back and forth, from Earth to Alpha, from Alpha to Earth, from 
Earth to Alpha to Omega in an inexhaustible but supremely exhausting loop? How 
many souls had lived and dreamed on it, died pounding on the doors of hope on 
it-the whole of their cosmos, the only cosmos that ever heard them, on that 
ship?
    I had even seen Sarah there-a much younger version of our poor Sarah, who 
had come upon this voyage to be released at last, to die, as she had told Kathy 
with her dying breath.
    Our species had been old enough to dream the day it was born.
    But never old enough for what became of those dreams on that ship.
    They were sentient, they were human, though that hulk had been trafficking 
between the beginnings and the ends for far longer than there had been humans on 
Earth.
    You see, I came to know many things on that hulk....
    But what shut down my brain, infinite amps through a finite circuit breaker, 
was the glimpse that that ship was ours-and I hadn't the strength to stop it.



Sixteen


    Bo
    

    "How did we sink this low? What happened here?" Bo realized he was shouting 
again. Nikki ushered him into her office. "What's happened to science, Nikita?" 
He lowered his voice. "Are we the only scientists left here-the only people of 
reason? We're a starship captained by lunatics from the Middle Ages!"
    "Aaron's a philosopher of science," Nikki said. "He used to teach-"
    "That's my point," Bo said, "'used to.' Aaron used to be a reasonable 
man-before he became boss of this ship. I'm sure Kathy was once a decent doctor 
too-before she started treating her patients with her pudendum. Jack was always 
a mystic. Believe me, my people have had plenty of experience with Rasputins; I 
can spot them miles away. We're a starship full of Rasputins. I feel sometimes 
like we'd be better off killing all of them!"
    She gave Bo that look: Bo, you're overreacting. Bo, take it easy. I agree 
with your frustration, but, Bo, there's no point in bursting a blood vessel. 
There's nothing we can do now.
    Right, and that was the problem.
    They had to find something they could do in case those Rasputins tried to 
pull a fast one. Bo felt he couldn't live another hour if he thought for a 
minute that he'd ever have to see that hulk in his face again.
    "OK, OK." He looked at his watch. "I'm relaxed now. I'll try to take it easy 
now. I'm going back to my room to take a nap." She squeezed his arm. He liked 
her. She had some intelligence.


    Bo lay in bed thinking.
    Man's first trip to a star would have been an insult to the cosmos without a 
Russian aboard!
    Russia got the human race off the planet in the first place!
    But when Bo had finally begun to understand the truth, the instability of 
that star system, what it did to all of those boomerang equations-yes, he'd 
wanted to go back to Earth, right then, like any sane man should. What, risk his 
life on what was left, the strength of some savage red man's theory? No, thank 
you. That's the problem with America. Yes, they have good science and good 
music, but they take their minorities much too seriously. What the hell did the 
Indians ever achieve that Bo should take one of their visions seriously-that he 
should risk his life on it? OK, they gave us corn. Bo liked corn better than 
potatoes; he'd give them that. But what did corn have to do with the price of 
the stars?
    He couldn't wait to see Alexei's face when he got back. You weasel. You have 
a stain on your head just like Gorbachev. Not a physical stain. Something 
deeper. A stain of deception. Alexei had lied to Bo, implied things about the 
boomerang that Bo discovered were not true. Almost too late-everyone had 
deserted him when he'd tried to do the right thing halfway out to Alpha 
Centauri-but not too late after all. Alexei never expected to see Bo again-but 
he was wrong! Boris Ivanoff didn't volunteer on this mission to die! He 
volunteered to live! To travel to the stars and return to tell the story! And 
that they were now doing.
    Yet Aaron the philosopher-king still was not happy! And that's what Bo could 
not understand. Aaron had promised a return home; he had let them drift into 
Alpha Centauri without a clue in his head as to how they would actually get 
home. And now they were going home-so what is he so worried about? We're all 
alive, aren't we? The kids are growing and healthy. So what if they all got back 
to Earth with no tangible records of their voyage? They would still have their 
memories. No one could ever take those away.
    Bo had some memories he'd rather not have. Memories he had walled off like a 
cyst so they didn't destroy him, but that he'd been unable to discard, even in 
this backward ride in time in which so much else was lost.
    McLaren understood. If only he would talk--but what was the use? Talking to 
that mute was like trying to get music from a stone.
    Nikki maybe was right. Bo could be uneasy about this all he wanted, but what 
could he really do? He had no control of the ship.
    The chime sounded. It was Nikki. Her face looked grave on the screen.
    "Aaron's had a heart attack," she said.


    Everyone was standing around Aaron's bed, fungi of life-support tubing 
coming out of him, Kathy crying her eyes out, everyone else like a grim Dutch 
Master. Bo couldn't say he was happy about this turn of events for Aaron-seeing 
a man die was never a pleasure-but all of this was yet more evidence of how 
these people lived in a dreamworld. Death and life-they're both part of the same 
dime, both part of life. You have to accept one if you want the other.
    "Is he ... dead?" someone's quavering voice asked of no one in particular. 
Bo thought it was Aviva.
    "No," Kathy said through puffed, muffled lips. She was bending over Aaron 
now, her face and hair intertwined with his. "He's in bad shape, though."
    "Only one person has died so far on this ship," Hiro said. "Let that be 
all."
    "One's a lot for this day and age," Nikki said.
    "This day and age means nothing out here," Jack said, more upset than Bo 
ever had seen him. "We're in an age by ourselves out here. Between the stress 
and the deep space and this time rollback, who knows what effect it has on the 
heart."
    "Sarah died on the way out," Nikki said. "Before the rollback."
    "That was a stroke," Hiro said.
    "Same river," Jack said.
    Shut up with that Indian bullshit already, shut up with it, Bo thought to 
himself. It was a fact of the cosmos, not a river. Bo had tried singing that 
Indian song with Jack when they first made the turn round ACA, but they had to 
be real now. They had to decide who would lead the ship.
    Kathy was wailing again, holding Aaron's head in her arms.
    There were tears in Bo's eyes too, though he couldn't say why.
    Aaron had tried his best; Bo had to admit that, at least.
    He looked around at everyone and marveled at how the nearness of death could 
equalize all other differences.


    Two days later Bo was in Nikki's office, along with Hiro and Jack.
    Kathy walked in with the news.
    "He's stable," she said. "He's alive for now. But no telling how long he'll 
be this way-or if he'll even be alive tomorrow."
    "Thank God he's at least stabilized," Nikki said, and put her arm around 
Kathy as she took her seat.
    Bo thought he could understand what must be in Kathy's mind: I'm the mother 
of two children. The father of the first is in some kind of autistic tailspin, 
the father of the second is nearly dead.
    "We, uh, we need to talk about leadership," Nikki said, trying to be 
deferential to Kathy's feelings but firm about the need to discuss this.
    "Oh," Kathy answered, distracted, "I hadn't thought-"
    "It's OK," Bo said, and put his hand on Kathy's. "None of us wants to think 
of this."
    She pulled her hand away. More in unconscious recoil than deliberate rebuff, 
Bo thought, but that was even worse. It told him that strong as her sorrow was 
about Aaron, it didn't dilute her dislike of Boris Ivanoff.
    "Who is the best candidate?" Hiro asked.
    "Well," Nikki said, "I was thinking that Bo-"
    "What?" Kathy looked at Bo. "I mean, well, sure, Bo would be OK," she 
continued, "but don't you have seniority here?" She said this to Nikki. Kathy 
couldn't be too happy about Nikki either, but, hey, anything's better than the 
stinking Russian....
    "Yeah, I do," Nikki replied. "But I'm too busy with programming now to take 
over Aaron's work."
    "Isn't Bo busy too?" Kathy asked.
    "Truthfully, no," Nikki said. "The automatic rollback that we're n makes 
engineering unnecessary-all they do is record increases in fuel and return 
positions in the stars that mirror what we had on the way out."
    "What about other people on board," Kathy persisted, "shouldn't they have a 
say too?"
    "I've already spoken to Aviva," Nikki responded. "She'll go along with the 
majority. The kids are too young to decide, obviously. Roger's in no condition. 
My gut tells me we should go with Bo."
    "That's been clear since the little insurrection years ago on the way out, 
hasn't it?" Jack finally spoke up. Everyone looked at him.
    Bo could never understand why anyone would care jackshit what Jack thought. 
He wasn't a scientist, he wasn't a technician, he was at best just an 
historian...
    Kathy looked at Jack.
    Hiro cleared his throat as if to speak. He has the crucial vote, Bo 
realized-a gardener, a cook, for crissakes! Nikki was for Bo. Bo was for Bo. 
Kathy and Jack for anyone else. McLaren and Aaron were out of it. Aviva said 
she'd go with the majority-
    "I think we should make it unanimous for Bo, then," Hiro said.
    Jack looked at Hiro a long time. Then again at Kathy.
    "Yes, let's make it unanimous," Jack said, and reached out for Kathy's hand.
    "OK," she said, quiet as a flower. Bo noticed that she couldn't bring 
herself to smile.
    But that was fine with him, more than fine. Now he'd have access to Aaron's 
office, all of his records. Maybe they'd be able to return to Earth without a 
hitch after all. Maybe Bo's sense that Aaron and his roundtable of dreamers were 
up to something no good was paranoia after all.
    These backward wheels of destiny had somehow finally conspired to put him in 
the driver's seat.


    Nikki was asleep next to Bo. The cream of Aaron's files was in a dataglass 
under Bo's bed. He reached under and patted the screen. It felt good to his 
hand. It was a great comfort to him. But he had no illusions about the kind of 
power he now had. It was fleeting, just like anything on a screen.
    Nikki stirred. She slid her hand over Bo's chest. "You're still awake," she 
said. "Let's get some sleep."
    "I have a lot to think about."
    "There are a million things that can go wrong," she said. "We've just got to 
concentrate on our game plan. Anyway, I've checked the computers a dozen 
times-our course back to Earth is steady."
    "Computers," Bo said. "I can't put my faith in them. Our computers, all of 
our equipment, showed us all sorts of nonexistent things on our way out."
    "Maybe they were echoes from other trips," Nikki said dreamily. "I overheard 
Jack and Aaron talking in the corridor about something like that. They think 
maybe our ship will bounce back from Earth to Alpha Centauri, just like it's 
bounced back here. And I was thinkin' maybe it'll keep on bouncing, bouncing 
back and forth, like a Ping-Pong ball in space...." She rolled over. The tip of 
her backside just touched the soft skin on Bo's thigh.
    "What good is being captain on a Ping-Pong ship like that?"
    " 's good." Nikki's speech was sleep-slurred. "In couple years we're back in 
the solar system. Redock Mars Vest, kiss the ship good-bye, just get off, go. 
Rest is who knows."
    Yeah, the rest is who knows, the rest is silence, the rest is sleep, the 
rest is death. Wasn't that Hamlet? Bo suddenly felt some of the thick pressure 
that Aaron must have been in.
    Bo didn't want speculation, he didn't want rest-he wanted certainty and 
life. Maybe the two were incompatible. Maybe the only real choice was the 
heat-death predictability of every planet and star, or an uncertain ride forever 
through the black hole of space.
    He rolled Nikki over.
    As long as he was so deep into dark space, he might as well enjoy it.











Seventeen


    Kathy
    

    Billy Jay Kramer's "Bad to Me" and the Four Tops' "Bernadette" were playing 
in an endless, back-to-back loop. The two songs sounded right together. Kathy 
didn't know why. Maybe because they both began with B. Maybe because she had 
once heard them played back-to-back on some Top 40 radio station in a prior 
lifetime, or as an egg in an egg in her grandmother's ovary....
    Few people understood what she got from music. Aaron did. But he was asleep 
in the next room.
    "Mommy?" Alicia skipped in from the sunroom with a bouquet of buttercups and 
a question. "Mommy? How many days before we get back to Earth?"
    "Oh, I don't know, honey." Kathy touched the flowers and ran her hand 
through Alicia's soft brown hair. "A lot of days-more than six hundred. These 
flowers are beautiful-I'm going to put them in the vase right over there."
    "Wow!" Alicia's eyes opened wide. "Six hundred! That's more than a million, 
right? A lot of days." She filled the vase with water and brought it to Kathy. 
Alicia's eyebrows were knotted now, as if she was wrestling with some sort of 
complex problem. She was looking more like her father every day.
    "Mommy?"
    "Yes, sweetheart."
    "Mommy, I don't know if I really want to go back to Earth. I'll miss my room 
here. It's our home," Alicia said.
    "Well, you'll have a lot more room back on Earth-you won't have to share 
your room with your brother."
    "But I like sharing Noah's room. When he's sleeping, or visiting Uncle Roger 
or someone, I get to play with his toys."
    "Hmm, I see what you mean," Kathy said. "But you'll have plenty of great new 
toys to play with on Earth."
    "Can I get a bicycle?" Alicia asked. "Like the one I saw in the virtel?"
    "Sure, we'll definitely get you a bicycle on Earth-lots of great new toys," 
Kathy assured her.
    Alicia still didn't look entirely convinced. "OK," she said. "But I still 
really like it here and don't care if we never get back to Earth and just keep 
flying and flying around and-"
    "Have you been talking with Uncle Jack about this again?" Kathy asked.
    "He made me promise not to tell," Alicia said.
    "It's OK, honey," Kathy said. "I'm glad that you have the kind of 
personality that you'll be happy wherever we are-here on the ship or back on 
Earth."
    "Person Ali means people like me, right?"
    "It means you have a soul that sings with the cosmos," her mother replied.
    Kathy had realized long ago that Noah and Alicia were impossible to shield 
on this ship. They couldn't help but know that they were heading back to 
Earth-because in fact they were-but they also couldn't help overhearing some of 
the talk about rebounding back to ACA. So the kids had to have mixed feelings 
about whatever happened.
    Kathy sighed. As a researcher, she had found this trip the most exhilarating 
project of her life-she would gladly live the rest of her life in space. But as 
a mother, she much preferred this trip ending happily ever after, with everyone 
back on Earth.
    Waves washing toes on a beach somewhere, little Licia pouring water back and 
forth into a hole, Noah masterminding a sandcastle project, everyone telling 
each other stories about the time they traveled to another star ... Aaron living 
forever to see not only his daughter but er children, their grandchildren, grow 
up ... And Roger regaining his power of speech, his mind, for Kathy knew that he 
still had it, buried deep somewhere. Roger had so much he could give to Noah, to 
everyone....
    Kathy's science told her that DNA had hardwired her brain and bartended her 
hormones to make her children's happiness and survival important above all else. 
Back on Earth, even on Mars Vest, such desire found many paths of expression. 
Some were compatible with larger pursuits of knowledge and the universe. This 
was appropriate for the human species. Nature, once understood, usually worked 
to make things easier, not harder, for people. Good doctors grasped that. Homo 
sapiens could pursue its biological survival at the same time as it fulfilled 
its cosmic responsibility of understanding and moving out to the stars.
    But out here between the stars, where the vistas and light streams and 
potentials for knowledge were infinite, the paths to her children's survival 
turned out to be very limited. In fact, there was likely just one.
    One path, one path only, to life.
    But which one?


    Aviva was in Hiro's garden. Kathy hadn't really seen her since she'd 
finished the beautiful digitraits of Noah and Alicia last month. Of course, they 
were never really finished. Aviva's talent, a combination of traditional 
artistic ability and keen programming know-how, was exquisite. The "intelligent 
portraits" of Noah and Alicia actually changed a little each day. Tiny modules 
in the screen with algorithms of the kids' DNA kept the portraits always 
current, always looking like the real faces as they grew. It was still too soon 
to notice any difference between these and traditional, static portraits-the 
kids hadn't changed in any discernible way in a month, other than Noah's inane 
pigtails, and in any case hairstyle was a function of whim, not DNA, so the 
digitraits couldn't pick that up. But Aviva had also done some stunning d-traits 
of several shrubs. She'd told no one about them except Hiro and Kathy, at first, 
and the two had been astonished. The d-traits now displayed the subtle 
blue-grays of the dwarf firs perfectly, more than six months after Aviva had 
captured their shiny greens on screen, and embedded the pixels with just the 
right algorithms for color change and aging. Of course, human DNA was a damn 
sight more complex than the DNA of little Christmas trees, but the principle of 
its embodiment in Aviva's pixels was the same.
    Its implications for permanent records of their voyage were towering. At 
last they had an image document that might survive the inexorable backward flow, 
because it simulated the antientropic, forward flow of DNA-the flow that 
animated their lives and minds, and likely kept Alicia and Noah in existence on 
the ship. Portraits that aged, literally. Oscar Wilde gone wild and digital, 
like so much else in the twenty-first century ...
    Aviva looked up. "Hi. How's Aaron?"
    "Holding his own," Kathy said. "You putting the flower gardens to screen? 
Wonderful idea!"
    "Thanks." Aviva smiled. "I want to get everything on this ship into screen 
mode. My renderings obviously could never be as convincing as the scientific 
evidence we lost, but at least they'll provide some inkling for the people on 
Earth of what we saw out there."
    "Yes," Kathy said. "Your ACA planet series should be a crucial part of 
that." Kathy closed her eyes and was there again. Just like that. She shivered 
to the mixed chords of delicate beauty and buzzed semi-consciousness, 
soft-breeze tinkling and wind chimes clanging, that this memory of N'urth always 
aroused.
    "Hiro's a very evocative narrator," Aviva said. "His words will be my eyes 
for the planet series."
    "An evocative world ...," Kathy breathed.
    "Oh," Aviva said suddenly. "Hiro told me you were coming. He had to check 
some sort of leakage over in aqua-he said you should look for him over there. He 
tried to call you, but there was no answer."
    "Ah, I was noncom in the pool," Kathy said, pulling herself away from the 
intoxicating contemplation. "But I'm glad I came by here anyway."
    A cool breeze snuck up behind her in the garden as she left to find Hiro.


    Kathy was late for her meeting with Hiro, which made her late for her next 
meeting. Once you lose a beat in a day, you can never recover, she thought. Even 
when the days themselves were going backward.
    Jack was already there in her office. He still had the keycode. "You look 
serious today," he said. "Everything OK?"
    "I guess so," Kathy said. "I don't know. For some reason, I've got the ACA 
planet and traveling backward in time on my brain today. I close my eyes and can 
almost feel my blood reversing circulation-my red blood cells giving back their 
oxygen, veins pumping blood from my heart-but when I look, my veins are blue. 
Sometimes it's harder than usual to make sense of our local lives being in 
normal time while the place we live in-this ship-goes in reverse time. You ever 
have days like that?"
    Jack looked at her without answering. It had been a while since she'd talked 
to Jack about feelings, his or hers ... his and hers.
    "Not exactly like that," he finally said. "But other kinds of disorienting 
stuff. We're in an upside-down situation here. Anything we write or program 
today without a genetic algorithm is gone tomorrow, so we have to write it again 
or put it in a program to copy it. We're accustomed to jotting something down on 
a piece of paper, and it's there the next time we look-that was a great comfort 
in the early days of computers, which were prone to crash. But both are toast in 
this time rollback. Only our memories endure on their own. Only living processes 
and things tied to them-the life field of this ship. It used to be the other way 
around-usually physical records endured, and specific flesh and memory failed. 
That's our usual orientation for control. So it's not surprising that we're 
always out of step with something or other out here. Some days it's worse. All 
we can do is ride it out."
    She walked over and put her arms around him. He leaned back in his chair, so 
that the top of his head was tucked under her chin. "It's been a long time," 
Kathy said quietly. "I know you were lonely. I'm sorry."
    "It's OK," he said. "You couldn't be in two beds at once. I understood 
that."
    "I still love you," Kathy said. "You know that." There were tears in her 
eyes. She tried to blink them back-she hadn't planned on this.
    "I know," he said. "And I, you-always."
    "I'm so worried about the kids. Let's say we do go all the way back to Earth 
and we stay there an instant too long. Let's say the kids do disappear. I don't 
think I could live through that. I sometimes think maybe the answer is that I 
should go off on a shuttle with both of hem-that way their life forces will 
outweigh mine, and maybe we'll get away. That's anxiety more than science 
speaking, I know, but-"
    "Shhh, it's OK." Jack was up and his arms were around Kathy and his face was 
so close that his skin absorbed her tears. "Going off in the shuttle isn't the 
answer," he said softly. "That could lead to death right away. We just have to 
keep on course to Earth and hope..."
    And Kathy realized that his mouth had stopped talking and was over hers, and 
it felt so good to kiss him-
    "Ahem," a voice said at the rear door, which opened to the bedroom.
    She broke free and turned to the door, embarrassed.
    "Aaron!"


    Jack poured the customary cup of Darjeeling for his old friend. The 
relationship between these two still amazed Kathy-each as cool as one of Hiro's 
cucumbers, seeming not the least bit flustered.
    "All right." Aaron sat down and opened his glimmering notebook. "Let's get 
down to our business for today. First, how are things on the Bo front?"
    "Good," Jack said. "I saw him this morning. He's in good shape, the ships in 
good shape. He's running the show fine-in some ways better than you." Jack's 
left eye twinkled.
    "I see you're in fine form today too," Aaron said.
    "Well, to give credit where credit is due," Jack replied, "I've got to say 
that putting Bo in command was a masterstroke-one of your best moves on this 
whole trip. His energies are now absorbed in trivia, yours are free to focus on 
important things, and should Bo try anything not in our interests, we'll see it 
coming a mile away. Brilliant, really."
    "Thank you." Aaron smiled.
    "The emotional price was awful," Kathy said.
    "I know," Aaron said, and put his hand on hers.
    "I'm still not sure how the kids are really taking this," Kathy said. "I 
mean, Noah's OK-he's older than we are, in some ways-but Alicia ... It's hell to 
tell a six-year-old that a few of her favorite people are going to pretend that 
her daddy's very sick, even though he isn't, really, and you can't let anyone 
else know about the secret."
    "She's not too good with secrets, is she?" Jack said affectionately.
    "I know it's been hard," Aaron said. "I'll try to spend some time with her 
again soon. But we had no other choice-not telling Alicia, letting her think 
that I really had had a heart attack, and was close to death when I wasn't, 
would've been far worse. You know that."
    "Not engaging in this pretense in the first place would've been less worse," 
Kathy said.
    Aaron and Jack both began reciting all the good reasons for the faked heart 
attack. Kathy wasn't interested.
    "Right, I know all that," she said. "But the children aside, I still can't 
feel good about your turning power over to Bo-power should always be held on to, 
if at all possible."
    "That's just what we're doing," Aaron said. "Holding on to power by letting 
Ivanoff think he has it. This was the best way."
    She shook her head. "Power is essentially unpredictable. You can't foresee 
with certainty what Ivanoff-what anyone-will do with it." But there was nothing 
to be gained in pushing this any further-Aaron, after all, just couldn't walk 
into his old office and resume command. His coronary ploy had gone too far for 
that. He'd have to go the route of getting gradually better, as they'd planned, 
so as not to alarm Bo. Good thing she was his doctor-the only doctor on board. 
"Anyway, we can't go back in time and change what we did." She smiled wanly at 
the irony, as did Jack and Aaron. "I agree that on balance it was better to tell 
the kids than not."
    "Good," Aaron said. "How are we doing in keeping my fine health secret, 
then?"
    "I think all right," Kathy said. "Certainly Bo and Nikki are acting like 
they have no idea. I don't think Aviva knows. Maybe Hiro has an inkling; I don't 
know. I saw him just an hour ago, and I had a feeling he had a feeling-like he 
knew just who'd be sitting around this table now and what we'd be talking about. 
But I always have a feeling that Hiro knows more than he lets on."
    "Wouldn't be the worst thing in the world if we brought Hiro in with us," 
Jack said. "Wouldn't surprise me if he knew what we were doing right from the 
start. The man has a deep intelligence."
    "That he does," Aaron said. "Not surprising that he's risen in importance 
here during our voyage."
    "He's risen along with the ascendancy of life processes on our ship. Life is 
timeproof here; nonliving matter falls behind. The engineer's a janitor; the 
gardener is king," Jack said.
    "Nice," Aaron replied.
    The three had become prone, for some reason, to cast their predicament in 
vivid little sayings. Like the sayings of Chairman Mao, Jack said, no doubt 
having Mao on some part of his brain because the Chinese leader's philosophy had 
been riding high again before they'd left, in the one part of Asia where 
Communism had stubbornly resurfaced.
    It was as if their hold on reality here, such as it was, was so tenuous that 
they had to regularly recite its mantras, volunteer its lessons already known, 
to convince themselves anew that it was real-that it and they were really going 
on.
    "Inert matter's completely under the thumb of entropy," Kathy said, playing 
her part. "Matter's a slave to time's arrow-it can't help but go along with it, 
whichever way it's pointed, even backward. But life and intelligence break the 
material mold, they go their own way against entropy, at least for a while."
    "Amen," Aaron said, taking a sip from his cup of tea.


    Tea segued into an early, unplanned supper. Good thing the kids were with 
Aviva, Kathy thought-it was so rare that she got to spend more than an hour 
alone with Jack and Aaron at the same time.
    Jack pushed away his pie plate and smacked his lips. "Outstanding. So what's 
left to discuss?"
    "Well," Aaron said, and glanced at his notebook, "the usual triumvirate of 
problems. Bo and the dangers from within. Naomi Senzer and who knows what might 
happen when we get within shouting proximity of Earth. And then, of course, the 
biggest problem of all: what the universe or the rule of space and time or 
whatever the hell we want to call it has in store for us."
    "Bo's taken care of," Jack said.
    "OK, but not Naomi," Aaron said. "If she knew what was happening, she 
wouldn't just stand by and let us go back out into deep space. But who knows 
what will be in her head when she sees us? To er it might well seem like our 
voyage was just on the verge of beginning. Not again, but for the first time."
    "I still can't get a clear image in my mind of what will happen at the point 
of complete return," Kathy said, "at the point when we're literally back to 
where we began."
    "Thousands of scenarios," Aaron replied. "But I guess we can divide them 
into two categories. In both cases, the time rollback continues right up to the 
precise instant of our departure from Mars Vestibule sixteen years ago. In 
Category One, our voyage ends there-the motion and time flux and everything 
stops. This is what Bo and Nikki are hoping for. We all disembark-and pray that 
the kids survive, that they're still with us. I have no idea what Naomi and 
Percival and the people back home will make of this. But if the kids survive 
this, who cares? We'll make the best of this whatever it looks like to everyone 
else on Earth.
    "But we can't be sure that will happen-that our trip will end with that 
reunion. In the alternative, in Category Two, we begin moving back out to ACA 
the instant after we return. Time begins ticking forward again. Presumably the 
kids will be OK in this category. We don't know if anyone will be able to get 
off the ship in this scenario- and we don't know what Naomi will think or do 
when she sees our ship leaving again, if she sees it leaving again. For all we 
know, the two departures will blend into one for the people back home-maybe like 
two parallel universes of action, in which only we on board perceive the two, 
because only we are part of both of them.
    "Billions of people saw the Light Through embark the first time. A first 
trip to the stars is a big thing. Now our time rollback may well rob the world 
of its payoff-the pleasure of seeing the ship return triumphant from Alpha 
Centauri, the satisfaction of knowing that it made it to the stars and back-if 
our return reads to them like nothing more than our original departure. Damn 
shame about that too." Aaron shook his head. "But it's best for the kids, and 
it's out of our control anyway. And I guess if the people on Earth didn't know 
that we'd already been out here-if the rollback left no memory of our leaving- 
then they couldn't miss a payoff to what they didn't know in the first place."
    "They won't miss it, but the enthusiasm we wanted to rekindle for he space 
program will. We'll be back to square one on that," Kathy said. And this twist 
was painful indeed-to travel all this way, to work for years before and during 
their voyage to inspire people to reach for the stars, only to be caught in some 
weird time loop which could turn their return into the beginning, the one, same 
beginning, and therein deprive their accomplishment of any meaning for anyone 
other than themselves.
    Kathy once would have grieved about such a loss as she would for the loss of 
a child. But now she had real children, and they meant more to her. "But we'll 
all be sixteen years older," she said. "Eight years forward to ACA at half speed 
of light, eight years backward to Earth at the same speed equals zero time 
passed for Earth and Naomi but sixteen years of aging for us. And Naomi will see 
the kids when she scans us. So she'll know that something is different."
    "She'll also see that Sarah's gone," Aaron said.
    Sarah's body had never returned to their ship. Jack had thought at first 
that it might. It was, after all, nonliving matter. But he finally concluded 
that maybe the universe distinguished between formerly alive and sentient, and 
never alive and sentient in the first place, and treated the formerly sentient 
differently. Kathy did not mind that Sarah's body had not returned, if there was 
no way to revive it. If this rollback respected the sanctity of death that had 
happened out here, maybe it would also respect the sanctity of two new lives 
that had been brought into being. Maybe...
    "Time travel's impossible to understand logically," Jack was saying. 
"There's no point giving ourselves a headache trying to fathom what Naomi 
Senzer's state of mind will be."
    "I know," Kathy said quietly.
    "We have more important problems-mainly the universe itself and its unknown 
laws," Jack said. "I sometimes get the feeling that it makes these up as we go 
along. It reacts to our presence and re-creates itself for our amusement."
    "Someone please tell it that we could stand being a little less amused," 
Aaron said.
    "Remember Story Musgrave's exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art?" Kathy 
asked. "Ran there for years."
    "How could I ever forget it," Aaron said. "The Hubble he repaired set the 
stage for all the megatelescopes and the Hubble II, which got his whole trip 
going when it picked up the shift between ACA/ACB and Proxima Centauri in the 
first place."
    Kathy nodded. "Well, there's one frame in the central repair collage that's 
always stuck in my mind. Musgrave's perched over a crucial repair. He's five 
hundred pounds of clumsy, weightless mass in his space suit, and no part of his 
body can touch any part of the Hubble, except for where he's making the repair, 
and except for some kind of footrest. His back looks like it has maybe an inch 
of moving room, and his arms have nowhere to lean. Even the slightest encounter 
can leave dust in the Hubble structure, which can undo the good of the repair."
    "Yes, I remember that," Aaron said.
    "And Story's voiceover commentary, and the words on the screen, describe how 
he felt at that moment. That his body somehow was a repairing needle in the hand 
of the cosmos, as well as an expression of the specific training he had 
undergone, the knowledge and initiative that he as an individual had brought to 
that moment. And how the mix had to be just right-how he had to listen to the 
underlying cosmic tempo as well as know just when to inject his own thought into 
the stitch."
    "And that's our story, isn't it?" Jack frowned at his own pun.
    "Yeah," Kathy said.
    "We've got to know just how long to go with the flow of the cosmos, and when 
to inject our own human moves into this process," Jack said.
    "The Hubble was broken," Aaron said. "And Story called upon the universe and 
fixed it. How can we repair the universe?"


































PART 3


Vanished Reunions







Eighteen


Noah looked at the sun on his twelfth birthday. Aaron was beside him. They knew 
the human solar system would soon come into view.
    "Just a matter of days now." Aaron squinted at the sun, now the size of a 
sweet pea. It warmed his skin, anyway, and even though no heat could possibly 
pass through the real-view window.
    The sun. No, the Sun. "You sort of half expect to see an orange spot beside 
it, though, don't you," Aaron reflected.
    "Looks just great to me," Noah said, his voice far deeper than Aaron 
remembered his being at twelve. "I've seen pictures of this, digiprints, for as 
long as I can remember, but they're nothing compared to what's actually out 
there. I can feel the presence of the planets, tingling with people."
    "They have no idea we're here," Aaron said. "They're living their lives in 
normal, forward time, so when they look out at the stars they see our ship as it 
was in this place sixteen years ago, on the way out. We're still in another 
dimension-the backward-time dimension- which hasn't remerged with the original 
yet."
    "No Alicia on that ship when it first left here, no me," Noah said. "Dad 
could talk; you and Jack were younger guys."
    "All in all I'd say we're better off now." Aaron put his arm around the boy, 
practically a man already. "Someday we'll get your father to talk again."
    "I still wish we could stay on Earth, at least for a while." Noah turned his 
attention back to the real-view window. "I know that we probably won't even get 
the chance, but if there were a way..."
    "You've been a planet person since the day you were born." Aaron smiled. 
"When we first got to ACA, you drove me crazy about taking you to N'urth. You 
talked your mother and me into it, but, whew, did I catch hell from some of the 
others for taking you."
    Noah smiled too. Aaron understood his need to be on Earth, to be with more 
people. But that chance wasn't Aaron's to give him. It was out of Aaron's hands, 
out of everyone's, as always. "But I'm glad I took you along to N'urth, anyway," 
Aaron added.
    "It's just a fuzzy memory to me now," Noah said, "more a sensation than an 
image. Aviva's done some pretty good d-traits of N'urth, though. One even has 
people. Too bad there weren't actually people there, other than us."
    "I guess what I'm trying to say is that I'm not sure there are really people 
out there on Earth and Mars-not for us, not now," Aaron said. He needed Noah to 
understand this.
    "You mean because we're traveling back in time?"
    "Right," Aaron said. "Because the people out there can't exist for us in 
this state in a real way. We can't interact with them, can't possibly affect 
them in any way. We can't see them yet, but when we do, I think we'll only be 
sampling them, in reverse, not really seeing them in a normal way. I guess it 
would be like trying to interact with someone in a recording. People living in 
different time flows are probably like recordings to each other-played in 
opposite directions, in our case, if that makes any sense."
    Noah considered. "But when we reach Mars Vestibule, when we reunite 
completely with the past, what about then? Why wouldn't we be able to really 
interact with everybody then? At that point, we'll all be in the same time 
frame, right?"
    Noah was more tentative than he had been as a child. Gone like the mists of 
N'urth was the splash-in-your-face assurance he once had had about everything. 
Children don't know enough to be unsure.
    "Maybe," Aaron said. "I don't know if we can just reinsert ourselves into 
Mars and Earth and the solar system, into its time sequence. We've been out of 
it now for sixteen years."
    "Too bad we're not really like a tape or a recording," Noah said. "They get 
requeued back to the beginning all the time, with no problem."
    "No, in that sense we're not a recording," Aaron replied. "We're beings with 
free will living inside a recording. This ship being sucked back in time-"
    Aaron's com beeped. Good-he didn't want to go much further along these lines 
with Noah. No point increasing Noah's anxiety beyond the high levels that it had 
already quite understandably reached.
    "Bo wants you over in your-his-office." It was Kathy. "He says he has a new 
message from Naomi."
    "What-a replay of an earlier-?"
    "No," Kathy said. "Bo says it's a brand-new message, welcoming us back 
home."
    "Isn't that impossible?" Noah asked.


    Bo was jumping with delight. "I told you it would work out-I told you it 
would be OK. None of you believed me!"
    Nikki objected. "I believed you."
    "Never mind," Aaron said. "Our situation has nothing to do with Bo's or 
anyone's predictions. Reality is the way it is."
    Bo glared. "So is that supposed to be a criticism of me? We have a message 
here from your Naomi Senzer, obviously of current vintage, as you'll see. It's 
wrong about just one thing: She thinks you're still in charge."
    "Impossible," Aaron said.
    "What," Bo asked, "that you're no longer in charge? Obviously that's not 
only possible but true."
    "No," Aaron said, "what's impossible is that Naomi suddenly sends us a 
message now. How could she break through the reverse time flow?"
    Nikki put her hand on Bo's shoulder. "Maybe the time rollback is slowing 
down to the point of normalcy," she said, "and one of the first things we're 
seeing of this is Naomi's ability to break through and send us this message. 
This could be good news, Aaron."
    "Could be," Aaron said. No point in fanning the flames any further. Keep 'em 
lit just enough to keep Bo and Nikki off balance, not enough to provoke open 
warfare. That had been his strategy these past few years. "Can I see it, 
please?"
    "Of course!" Bo clapped Aaron on the back. "That's why I wanted you to be 
with me now-not to argue, to celebrate!" He put Naomi's message on the screen.


    "You can't imagine how thrilled I was to get a glimpse of your ship," Naomi 
said. She looked just as Aaron would have expected had they not been in a time 
rollback-hair somewhat grayer, mousier, maybe a bit more dyed or rinsed or 
whatever they called it in this century, clothes slightly different in cut and 
style-an image that announced nearly two decades' passage. This was far more 
convincing than the Mars Vestibule date stamp, which was easy enough to fake. 
"If it really was your ship- I mean, we just got the briefest look at you," 
Naomi continued. "You've been out of touch for so long, we thought... maybe the 
worst. But if our readings are right, you should be back here in a few days. I 
told the president-she was delighted! You probably don't know her-Jane 
Oglesby-she was elected four years ago. An unknown from Alaska. I'm secretary of 
space domains now, serving in my third administration. JFC created the new post, 
cabinet level, and appointed me at the end of his term, in large part because of 
the excitement about what you discovered on your voyage. I just got off the 
phone with him. He's thrilled! We all are, Aaron, all of us. Everything's 
changed here. Space development's in high gear again, lots of great projects 
under way, and it's never coming down. I hope you receive this, and you and the 
crew are well. Your whole trip was an act of faith, you know-it's hard to 
believe it worked out, and you're all right. I'm so glad. A great big hug for 
you soon." Her smile seemed to linger on the screen like the Cheshire Cat's 
after the rest of her image had faded.
    "I don't believe a word of it," Aaron said.
    "Why not?" Jack asked with acid sarcasm. "One great big hug trumps 
everything we've been thinking for the past eight years. We're supposed to be 
traveling back in time, she's supposed to have no idea where we've been, what 
we've done, yet there she is, big mop of appropriately aged hair, welcoming us 
back home after our long journey. What's there not to believe? It's all there on 
the screen. It must be true."
    "Be as carping as you like," Nikki said. "But the message is right there on 
the screen. And it's real. I can show you the tracking."
    Aaron waved his hand. "Means nothing." He was sure she could, nd the fact 
that she was offering made that suspect as a reliable proof.
    "I don't get you people, I really don't." Bo looked at Aaron and Jack with a 
glance that would've encompassed Kathy too, except she was on the other side of 
the room. "What the hell are you so afraid of? We're a few days away from home. 
We receive a message that shatters our preconceptions of what's been happening 
to us. So, OK- we revise our hypothesis. The fact is, we're here. Our working 
theory about how we got here was wrong. That's the way of science, right? What's 
the problem?"
    "That's only half of science," Aaron said. "The other half, when you're hit 
in the face with evidence that contradicts your theory, is you reexamine the 
source of the evidence to make sure it's valid. Make sure your equipment wasn't 
faulty or tampered with."
    "Here we go again," Nikki said. "Every time our instruments tell you 
something you don't like, you blame it on the instruments."
    "Have we sent a reply to her gray-headed eminence?" Kathy asked.
    "Yes," Bo said. "I, uh, I sent a brief one."
    "And?" Kathy prodded.
    Bo shrugged. "It got eaten up same way as everything else we've tried 
sending off this ship."
    "So whatever's going on," Kathy said, "we still seem subject to the same 
rollback effects or whatever they are."
    Bo shrugged again.
    "What is your new, revised theory, by the way?" Kathy asked.
    "Look," said Bo, his voice rising. "I don't really give a rat's ass about 
theories anymore, OK? Maybe I wasn't clear about that. I care about getting 
home, getting all of us home, alive. But you want a theory for this? You want to 
play your theory games to the bitter end? Fine. Try this one: We haven't been 
traveling back in time at all. We've been traveling back to Sol and Earth, all 
right, but in real, forward, normal time. And the strange effects we've 
experienced-well, they're obviously due to something else that's going on out 
there."
    "Strange effects that include traveling at half-C speed from ACA back to 
Sol, with no fuel-with constantly increasing fuel-and these effects don't 
involve a time rollback?" Kathy said. "Hard to believe."
    "You asked, I told you," Bo said. "It doesn't matter."
    Jack exhaled loudly.
    "And what the hell are you sighing about?" Bo turned on him.
    "You've got a better theory? What-some Apache mumbo jumbo? I'm supposed to 
pay more serious attention to that than science?"
    Jack smiled slightly. "I was commenting on the absurdity of saying it 
doesn't matter. I think it very much does."
    "I'll tell you what I think is bothering you people," Nikki spoke up. 
"You're afraid that you'll look like fools coming back to Earth empty-handed 
after sixteen years. We've got no objective records of our journey-no direct 
images, no sounds, no readings, nothing. You'll have to face Naomi, tell your 
story, answer her questions, with nothing but your... your recollections in your 
hand."
    That can't be right, Aaron thought.


    Aaron, Jack, and Kathy took seats around the table in Kathy's office. They 
were too upset to think about making tea.
    "Let's say Naomi's message is really what it seems," Kathy said. "Why can't 
we live with that?"
    "It would mean that anything and everything we think happened to us in the 
past sixteen years-except that we've actually been away for sixteen years-might 
not have actually happened," Aaron replied. "The kids are, of course, here and 
real, and Sarah's clearly not here, but everything else... well, for all we 
know, all we did was travel a light-week beyond the Oort, floated around in some 
hallucinogenic soup that also fooled all the instruments all the time-or at 
least our perception of the instruments-and just a few days ago we turned 
around. We can live with that, sure. But do you really believe that's what 
happened?"
    "You can fool all of the instruments some of the time, some of the 
instruments all of the time, but you can't fool-"
    "Stop it," Kathy said sharply to Jack. "The kids would be safer, more 
secure, in that Oort scenario. No time rollback to flatten them."
    Jack shook his head. "I wish it were so. But Aaron's right. That message 
can't be real."
    Kathy looked tired. "For years we've been pulling in every nuance, every 
scrap of statistic, to convince ourselves that the rollback was actually 
happening. Now we have Naomi's face to the contrary. And let's face it, her face 
is far more convincing than most of the other evidence."
    "Yeah, on the face of it," Jack said.
    "Why, exactly, don't you believe it?" Aaron asked Jack. "I mean, other than 
our conviction that we are in a time rollback, and this makes such a message 
from Naomi impossible. But what else in the message itself? If it's faked, there 
should be things wrong with it. Things we should be able to spot."
    Jack considered. "It's too perfect. She looks too much like what we'd expect 
her to look like after sixteen years, and her story about who's now president, 
her appointment to the cabinet, that reads too well. I don't know ... her hair 
is too deftly grayed. I don't buy it. A woman with her vanity would've kept it a 
darker color."
    Aaron nodded. "I didn't like her story, either, but there was at least one 
thing in her recitation that only she and I could know."
    "What?" Kathy asked.
    Aaron told them about the message Naomi claimed to have received about their 
great discovery near ACA. "She mentioned the excitement that word of our 
discovery-presumably of the hulk-created back home. But the time rollback should 
have rolled back that message into oblivion."
    "It must have," Jack said. "And all that Naomi's reference to it in her 
current so-called message shows is that whoever faked it had knowledge of the 
original message."
    "Who?" Aaron asked.
    "Anyone on the ship," Jack said. "Bo, Nikki, anyone."
    "And you think that even before we made the turn around ACA, someone risked 
trespassing my code and read private messages between Naomi and me? Whoever it 
was had to be pretty good," Aaron responded.
    "Like I said," Jack said. "We've got some good candidates."
    "Still inconclusive," Kathy said. "We're trying to decide whether Naomi's 
new message is real. Aaron says that something she says counts against the time 
rollback-something that refers to a private communication between them years 
ago. You say, no problem, any of us could've had unauthorized access to that 
communication. But we have no hard evidence of that either. So you're using one 
supposition to support another. Awful lot of ad hocs in that chain."
    "Well, I still don't care for the color of the lady's hair," Jack said. 
"Nothing ad hoc or suppositional about that."
    "How do you know that shade of gray isn't high style in American politics 
right now?" Kathy asked.
    "What? Precisely the shade that we would expect to see after sixteen years 
of her aging? Not very likely," Jack retorted.
    "I wish we had something stronger than her hair," Aaron said. "Hell, for all 
we know, the woman's been wearing a goddamned hairpiece all of these years."
    "They probably say the same thing about you ...," Jack said.
    "I checked tracking on the message," Kathy said wearily. "It's exactly as 
Nikki says. The individual words-aside from the overall problem we're grappling 
with here-seem all right. The transmission specs are what we'd expect of an 
incoming message from Mars V-."
    "Just what we'd expect from a message of Nikki's fabrication," Aaron said.
    "So now you think it's a fabrication by Nikki?" Kathy asked.
    "Forget about Nikki and her smarts and her motives," Jack said. "Ultimately 
what we've got here can be decided only on the basis of the message itself. It's 
still here for our viewing. It presents itself as the first nonliving process 
that's endured in our time rollback. That's the crucial point-does it measure up 
to that? We've got to sift every megabyte of it with that in mind. If it holds 
up, that means either the rollback is over, or it never occurred, though I don't 
believe-"
    "Yes," Aaron said, and thought for a long time. He was concentrating on tiny 
snowflakes, like those on the edge of a video screen, that danced now at the 
very edge of his awareness. These things were tricky-you could lose them in an 
instant if you reached out too quickly to touch them, if the heat of your 
fingertips made them melt....
    Jack and Kathy were staring at him, waiting.
    "Let's bring Aviva into this," he said.


    Aviva Zerez had been twenty-three when she left Mars Vestibule for the 
stars, but everyone said she looked fourteen. Now she was nearing forty, but 
everyone on the ship still thought she looked maybe sixteen or seventeen.
    Aaron's sense of her had blended more and more into his sense of Alicia the 
past few years-partly because her digitraits of Alicia and Noah were 
centerpieces in his new office, partly because she had been he closest to a 
friend Alicia's own age that Alicia had had on the ship.
    Some people were like that-they looked young almost all of their lives, up 
to the very brink of decrepit old age. Others looked adult almost from the day 
they were born. Sarah Chichester had been like that. Aviva's digitrait of her 
looked not only like Sarah the day before she died, but like photographs of her 
thirty or more years earlier. "She had the kind of DNA that sprung into adult 
features very early on, and then kept them pretty well locked in that way," 
Aviva said, pulling up a series of DNA algorithms-Sarah's-on the digitrait, 
algorithms that were mostly indecipherable to everyone in the room except Aviva. 
"Her digitrait looks more like a photograph than a digitrait, because the 
underlying algorithms are so rigid."
    She put another image on the screen-Naomi Senzer smiling like the Cheshire 
Cat at the end of her message. "You were right about this one," Aviva said. Her 
eyes connected with Aaron's, then swept around to Jack and Kathy. "This message 
from Naomi Senzer was neither from Naomi nor Mars Vest-it's a living program 
based on sixteen-year-old images and recordings of Naomi that, ah, grew into the 
message you saw. Brilliant piece of work-the algorithms are stunning."
    "That's why the message didn't die," Jack mused. "It's a living process-a 
digital living process-like your d-traits."
    Aviva nodded.
    "And getting this digigrown message to say currently applicable things--like 
welcome back home-is trivially easy, I assume," Jack continued.
    "Trivially easy. Yes," Aviva said.
    "Who has the knowledge to create such a program?" Kathy asked. "Other than 
you, of course."
    "No, this is way beyond my ability to create," Aviva said. "I have all I can 
do with still images. This is as far beyond me as Hitchcock from Daguerre."
    "So, who, then? If you were pressed for your best guess," Kathy asked.
    "Obviously, Nikki is the only one with the computer talent to do this-but 
the aesthetic quality goes way beyond what I would've expected of her. And Hiro 
has... well, he has the sense of image, but I'm not sure of his mathematics, and 
anyway, I-"
    "That's OK," Aaron said. No point in pushing her on Hiro. He ad guessed for 
a while that they had more than a professional relationship. "Nikki's the only 
one with any reason to do this."
    "How so?" Kathy asked.
    "Let's assume she believes, as we all did, that we've in fact been traveling 
in a time rollup back to Earth," Aaron said. "By throwing us a curve like 
this-by making us doubt whether we've been traveling backward in time-she 
dilutes our focus on what might actually happen the instant the rollback is 
complete. She, on the other hand, is able to keep all of her attention on that. 
So at that crucial moment, she and Bo are able to respond more effectively to 
whatever happens than we can."
    "Seems a lot of trouble to go through for just a leg-up like that," Kathy 
said. "And I can't quite see Nikki planning all of it-she's sharp, yes, but not 
that Machiavellian."
    "Maybe Nikki's doing someone else's bidding," Jack said.
    "Whose? She rides Bo, not vice versa," Kathy said.
    Aaron looked at Aviva-they didn't often talk like this in front of her. 
Still, there was no way they could seal her off from it now. "Aviva, do you 
think it possible that earlier communications from Naomi could also have been 
digigrown? In fact, what about all the rest of the data we've received during 
this trip-the images of N'urth, ACA from afar-"
    Aviva shook her head. "No way I can tell now; all of those disappeared long 
ago in the time rollback."
    "Then that suggests they weren't digigrown," Kathy said.
    Aviva nodded.
    Aaron nodded too, but something slightly different was courting his 
attention. "Let me make sure I'm understanding something," he said to Aviva. "If 
any earlier messages from Percival or whomever were living forms-artificial-life 
algorithms-then they should have survived the time rollback. And the same 
applies to all the other data: Any datum which we thought was a recording of a 
real event but which was actually an A-L fabrication should have survived. 
Right? Because they were sims of living processes, just like your d-traits. But 
in fact they did not. We've lost all our earlier data-only the reports that 
we've re-created and locked into autocopying programs have survived-and the same 
with the messages. So is this proof positive that they weren't digigrown?"
    "I'm not completely sure what you're getting at," Aviva said. "But, yes, 
messages and data that were generated by artificial-life algorithms should have 
made it through the time rollback-just like Hiro's plants and my digiprints and 
anything else running on DNA or A-L active codes. Whether the code is natural or 
artificial, whether it comes from an organism's DNA or was created from scratch 
by me to capture an event-whether it operates in living tissue or hardware-none 
of that should make a difference. If it's a living algorithm-either DNA or 
A-L-then it's antientropic and should have survived the time rollback, at least 
from what we know about the rollback so far."
    "But does their not surviving then mean that they were not the result of 
A-L?" Aaron persisted.
    "Well, why else wouldn't they have survived?" Aviva asked.
    "Because maybe someone erased them," Jack said, suddenly on to where Aaron 
was going. "We think the natural course of A-L programs in our time rollback is 
that they endure-unlike regular data files, which don't. But that doesn't make 
the A-L stuff immune to deliberate deletion, does it? For crissakes, you can 
kill a living organism and dispose of the body, right?"
    "Sarah died and she didn't come back," Kathy agreed.
    Aviva thought. "Well, if you put it that way, you're right, of course. 
Someone could erase my digiprints, and then they'd be gone, just like flat data. 
Though maybe not entirely ..."
    "How would that work?" Aaron urged.
    "Well, Nikki's the expert on that," Aviva said, "on the metaphysics of 
erased data-where it is, what it is, how we can get at it. But let me try. I 
know the footprints of this morning's message, the traces it would leave in any 
directory even after it was erased. Let's see if I can find any sign of similar 
prints. Let's see-"
    Aaron swung a screen over to her, and in a single jiggle of his fingers gave 
Aviva stealth access to the ship's entire net.
    "Yeah," she said after a long few minutes. "They're here. The prints are 
clear. I can see traces of five earlier messages."
    "Whose prints?" Kathy asked. "Nikki's?"
    "Same prints as today's," Aviva said.
    "The message I got from Percival just as we entered the ACA system," Aaron 
said.
    "No. Not that one. The dates don't match."
    "What? Which ones, then?" Aaron demanded.
    "I can't recover the messages themselves, only the dates," Aviva said and 
rattled off two dates.
    Aaron frowned, shook his head. "Five damn birthday messages from Naomi and 
my grown children back on Earth."
    "Birthday messages?" Kathy asked.
    "Doesn't make sense," Aaron said. "Why go through the trouble?"
    "To perfect her craft," Jack said. "What better way than birthday greetings 
to try out a radical new technique that makes forgeries of people talking? Who 
would pay any real attention to that?"
    Aaron's mouth was open. "She was planning this all the way back then?"
    "I'll tell you one thing," Aviva said. "Whoever did this obviously has a lot 
more computer talent than I realized, and has had it for a long time. Nikki's 
the only one I can think of who even remotely fits that bill."
    "We did realize it," Kathy mused, "or at least we should have realized what 
was right in front of our eyes. Nikki outprogrammed Bo during the mutiny crisis 
on the way out without batting an eyelash."
    "What about the rest of the data?" Jack asked, suddenly agitated. "The 
N'urth images, all that stuff? Don't tell us they were just electron milkshakes 
too. Don't tell us all of our work-"
    "I'm amazed to see you care so much," Aaron said truthfully.
    "No," Aviva said, looking again at her screen. "Nothing else I can see here. 
No traces of A-L except the five earlier messages."
    "You sure?" Aaron asked.
    "Yes," Aviva said. "A-L traces are very distinctive once you know what 
you're looking for."
    "Did you reply to any of the birthday greetings?" Kathy asked.
    "No," Aaron admitted. "I guess I was too busy."
    "If you had, Nikki no doubt would've made sure that they weren't sent," 
Kathy said.
    Jack nodded. "So assuming this track we're on is right, we've had three 
messages created, likely by Nikki, to appear like they were from Naomi-two old 
happy birthdays to Aaron and today's bombshell. Plus the three other birthday 
cards from Aaron's children on Earth. But the rest of our telecom data was real. 
Which is why it disappeared in the time rollback. Which I guess offers some 
evidence that we have indeed been time back-pedaling, though the web is getting 
tangled indeed."
    "I'm sure I'm right about the print tracings," Aviva said.
    "I'm glad," Aaron said.
    "Aaron?" Aviva asked. "Can I say something to you-to all of you?"
    "Of course."
    "Well, we've talked about this before, but I just wanted to say to you again 
that I-and Hiro too-we appreciate everything you've done for us, all three of 
you. I know we didn't support you on everything, but that's because We Were 
frightened. I think it's much easier for humanity as a concept, a group, to go 
out to the stars than any one person. Humanity gets the glory on the backs of 
individuals who feel the pressure, the anxiety, the little paper cuts on their 
fingers. I know you've suffered a lot-I think everyone on this ship has. But now 
the trip is almost over, and, well, I just wanted you to know, and Hiro feels 
this Way too, that-"
    "I know," Aaron said, and reached out and squeezed her hand.
    "We appreciate you and Hiro too," Jack said.
    Kathy walked over to Aviva and kissed her on the forehead. She sat down next 
to her.
    "So what do we do now?" Kathy said.
    "Well, we have three, maybe four more days until we arrive at Mars Vestibule 
and our rollback is complete," Aaron replied. "And then we still don't know 
what's actually going to happen."


    Kathy was in the shower.
    Aaron was in bed.
    He did have some notions about what might happen at the point of reunion, 
but none was appealing.
    None included a welcome home from a humanity appreciative of what they'd 
tried to do on its behalf-the sacrifices that Aviva had been talking about. That 
possibility had evaporated with Naomi's fabricated message.
    If this time reversal was really happening, maybe hundreds, even thousands 
of ships had made the trip to Alpha Centauri in some human past, to other stars 
too, only to return in a time swing that left the Earth utterly ignorant of 
their voyages.
    If that was the truth of the stars and travel between them, maybe that's why 
so many people back home seemed so uninterested in any serious pursuit of space 
as a human future-seemed even put off by it. Maybe all of their talk about let's 
get our house in order on Earth before we reach for the stars was just an 
unconscious defense mechanism, a dodge on behalf of a deep, self-protective, 
genetically instilled need to avoid the futility of travel to another star, the 
absurdity of the time loop that the Light Through was going through right now. 
Just one of an infinity of ships bouncing back and forth forever...
    Or, for all Aaron knew, perhaps they were all the same ship. Maybe the Light 
Through itself had somehow been this way before-maybe that's why their initial 
launch had succeeded in happening against all odds, on the strength of an Indian 
legend and an unproven theory, as Bo had not been wrong in pointing out all of 
these years. Maybe their ship had to be launched because it was already in 
motion.
    Whatever was truly happening, none of Aaron's scenarios for their return 
included much peace or sanity, the sip of contentment that he would have wanted 
everyone on board to have had as they looked back and contemplated a voyage on 
the whole extraordinarily well done.
    And none of the scenarios even included lives that continued unbroken.
    Had Naomi's message been real, had the time reversal not been real, had they 
been approaching Mars Vestibule on her terms, then the kids' lives would have 
been secure, almost without a doubt. Kathy wasn't wrong to have yearned for 
that.
    But as it was, they were still in the lap of paradox and their frail best 
guesses as to how to get around it....
    Kathy came out of the shower. Her terry-cloth bathrobe was open at the 
waist. Her sleek, wet body always looked good to Aaron.
    She slipped under their covers.
    "No songs tonight?" he asked. Kathy almost always put on a loop of music 
when they went to bed.
    "No," she said. "We're beyond the music of the spheres now."
    Aaron didn't say anything more. Not about the music, not about the tears he 
felt on his shoulder.
    Aviva had really said it all.
    Humanity goes to the stars.
    People feel the pain.











Nineteen


    Sunny-side-up egg on the plate. Seemed that everywhere Aaron looked this 
week he was staring into the sun. He tore into this one with his fork.
    "Third egg you've had this week, Daddy," Alicia said. "Mommy says-"
    "Yeah, I know what Mommy says, sweetheart," Aaron said. "But this is one of 
those weeks when I need a lot of protein."
    Kathy walked over and put a cup of Darjeeling in front of him and gave him a 
look that said, What are you trying to do, get a heart attack for real now to 
top off our trip?
    No point in telling her that the latest studies said that egg cholesterol 
contributed to clean arteries in some cases-because the latest studies were 
actually more than sixteen years old, had likely been contradicted, confirmed, 
and contradicted again in the eight years in forward time in which the Light 
Through had made its journey to ACA- eight years that no longer existed, hadn't 
even happened yet for the people back here. So he just smiled at Kathy and 
sipped his tea.
    Unlike the egg on his plate, the sun outside was getting bigger. Another few 
days at most, and their implosion, their trip backward to the beginning, would 
be over.
    What then?
    "Aviva should be here any minute," Kathy said.
    "Oh, good," Alicia said, "she can help me with my salamander print."
    "Not today, honey," Kathy said. "Aviva has some work to do with Daddy."
    "Maybe she'll still have some time for your salamander," Aaron said. "I know 
the people on Earth would love to see your salamander on the screen."
    "OK." Alicia bounded off her chair and gave him a kiss. "I'm going over to 
Hiro's garden to get another look at her-the spots on her skin are just 
beginning to come out."
    Aaron hugged his daughter and she left.
    "Aviva's digitraits are great," Kathy said, "but they won't be proof of 
anything."
    "I know," Aaron said. "Naomi'll want snapshots of real events, images 
untainted by subjectivity, immaculate conceptions of reality, not paintings and 
programs. But who knows, the d-traits may jar some interest on Earth anyway."
    "A snapshot can be digitally manipulated too," Kathy said. "Nothing's sacred 
in the digital age."
    "I know."
    "How are we going to get the d-traits off the ship?" Kathy asked.
    "I guess whoever gets off the ship will take them. Electrons on wafers don't 
weigh much. A larger problem is that we still have no idea if they'll survive 
beyond the point of reunion with forward time." No sense in repeating the 
obvious, more important question that cleared its throat constantly now in 
everyone's head, even in Bo's, Aaron knew, for all his swaggering-would they 
survive that shift? Would staying on the ship or leaving be more conducive to 
survival? "Still, I can't see any harm in having Aviva prepare as many d-traits 
as she can," Aaron continued. "We've certainly got nothing better to do at this 
stage."
    Kathy came over and put her arms around his back and neck. He soaked in 
every bit of it.


    Aviva's digital portraits were nonpareil. She'd been working on some of 
these for years now, but, like many artists, had waited until the last minute to 
put in some of her best program touches. The results, like all digital 
concoctions, were ultimately based on numeric relations, but her images were as 
far away from painting by the numbers as Impressionism was from its raw elements 
of water and light. Monet and Aviva ad much in common, Aaron thought, though 
Aviva had done more than capture the pure light of reality that had splashed 
through Monet's eyes a century and a half earlier. She had captured the light in 
motion, in imperceptibly developing reality, and without the slight-of-eye of 
motion photography. She had distilled the contents of everyone's perceptions, 
recollections, garnered from years of conversations, into A-L algorithms that 
captured, reanimated, literally brought each of the major discoveries of their 
voyage into brief sequences of life.
    There was N'urth from twelve different perspectives, ranging from the soft 
green invitation it issued the hour Aaron's party arrived to the cloying clutch 
it had on them as they left. And here was that hulk again, maddeningly unclear, 
an ultimately ineffable form that Aviva had somehow impossibly captured with 
perfect precision. But Alpha Centauri A was the real star of this exhibition-as 
indeed it should have been-glistening, glowing, beaming at its orange sister, 
beckoning from a dozen angles of approach, nearly burning their faces, spitting 
them back in the direction from which they came in a way no one except maybe 
Wise Oak had envisioned beforehand. But Aviva had rendered it all with a 
crystal-clear vision of hindsight.
    Aaron lingered over the last image on his screen. "These in themselves make 
our voyage worthwhile," he said.
    "Thank you," Aviva said, and she might have blushed. "But I think what 
you've been saying about them is right-they'll be looked at as lovely fantasies, 
if they get through to Earth, unless some of us can be there to convince people 
that these scenes were real. A picture is worth a thousand words, but most of 
them still come with titles and captions. And a programmed painting is always 
more suspect than a photograph-always taken as more expressive of the creator's 
hand than the object depicted-even though it may show the exact same piece of 
reality."
    "And these can be shown on any screen, in any order, linked in any way the 
viewer wants?" Aaron asked, preferring the comforting detail rather than the 
underlying question Aviva was raising again. He had no good answer to that 
question. Sometimes he felt like the bandleader on the Titanic, heroically 
focusing on the music as the ship went down.
    "Yes," Aviva said. "They're self-contained and self-implementing, but should 
also be operational on all known equipment. Of course, that means all equipment 
known to me sixteen years ago. I can't be sure that something new didn't come 
along-no, of course not, nothing new could have come along if no time has 
actually passed back here."
    "That's right," Aaron said. He was thinking again about the sun- Sol-and the 
plate where his egg had been. Nothing but a few stains of yellow and white had 
been left. "Difficult things, those little algorithms, aren't they?" he said. 
"Lots of guesswork. If you'd done a digiprint a few days ago of the egg I ate 
for breakfast this morning, it no doubt would have masterfully hatched into a 
chicken eventually. As it is," he laughed hoarsely, "it's now chomped to 
smithereens and undergoing total chemical deconstruction in my stomach."
    "DNA isn't everything," Aviva said. "The most genetically predetermined 
trait in existence means nothing if the environment gobbles up the organism the 
DNA is in."
    "You've done an incredible job," Aaron said. "We'll figure out some way to 
make sure our trip endures as more than just a beautiful fantasy. And your work 
will play a crucial role in this, I'm sure."
    There was a slender tear in her eye. Aaron pictured it dropping on her 
keyboard as she labored, hitting just one key, with just enough pressure to 
depress the key halfway. Would it make a mark on the screen? He wondered what 
that single half-mark, that mark with a 50 percent probability of being made, 
would do to the overall picture....
    Likely much the same as a ship returning from a trip to Alpha Centauri in a 
way that played as if it had never been there.


    "It's time we had a talk," he said, surprising Nikki at lunch.
    "Well, sure, Aaron-come in, sit down."
    "Thanks." He cleared the least cluttered chair-one thing he'd always liked 
about Nikki was that her office was almost as messy as his-and sat down. "Look, 
we've got a day or two at most left, the new readings-"
    "I know," Nikki said.
    "-and I think the time for pretense between us is over. We owe it to 
ourselves, and the chances for everyone's survival here, to be as honest as 
possible now. We should at least be sure that we're all reporting everything 
correctly as we make reunion. We should at least be able to rely on what we're 
getting from each other. God knows we'll have no idea if we can rely on what we 
get from beyond this ship."
    "OK," Nikki said. "Go on."
    "Well, we've tagged your little message from Naomi as an A-L concoction," 
Aaron said. "I can't say I know exactly why you did it. It doesn't matter at 
this point. What counts now is that everyone on this ship has to be clear that 
to the best of our knowledge we've in fact been traveling back eight years in 
time."
    Nikki stared at him. "You know, you started the deceit with your little 
heart attack charade, and who knows what else before."
    "Nikki, I-"
    "Oh, I know you had your good reasons," she said. "I know you needed to get 
Bo off your back. But by not including me on the inside, you put me on the 
outside. There's no in between."
    "Nikki, I needed someone who was close to Bo to be thoroughly convincing, 
otherwise-"
    "And you couldn't count on me to give a good performance, so you had to lie 
to me. Kathy, of course, knew the truth-how convenient she's the ship's doctor. 
And Jack, I'm sure, was in on everything."
    Aaron reached out and took her hand. "You've been absolutely essential to 
this trip-to our survival so far. You've come through at every crisis. You know 
that. You know that I know that."
    "Thank you," she said. "Can I put that on my resume when we get back?"
    "Can't we forget about this?" Aaron asked. "You forget about the heart 
attack and I'll forget about the message from Naomi? And then we can rely on 
each other today or tomorrow or whenever it happens."
    Nikki nodded. "I want this to be over already. You want the truth? I faked 
the message from Naomi because I can't trust you. I wouldn't put it past you to 
pull the Light Through right back out into space at the last minute if you 
thought that would serve some kind of higher purpose. I figured that if you 
thought we weren't in a time rollback after all, and Naomi was in contact with 
us, that might stay your hand. You want the truth? I'm sick of this ship. I'm 
sick of Bo and his bad breath. Sick of the pissant drizzle that passes for rain 
in Hiro's magical garden. I wanna get caught in a real goddamn downpour again. I 
wanna pass out drunk on a park bench somewhere and get soaked to the bones if I 
feel like it. Sixteen years in a flying petri dish is too long, Aaron."
    "We'll be there very soon," Aaron said.
    "And what's gonna happen then?" Nikki asked.
    "I don't know," Aaron said, his favorite response of late, though probably 
it had been on top of the list throughout the trip. "I think it all depends on 
how long our ship can maintain its internal state."
    "You mean how long we-our people on board-can keep our current sense of 
time?"
    "Right," Aaron said. "Clearly we have an internal environment in this ship 
that has allowed us to live and think normally in forward time even though the 
ship has been traveling backward. We don't know what will happen to that once we 
reunite with normal time-Mars Vest at the instant we left sixteen years ago."
    "But why should anything happen?" Nikki asked. "I mean, we'll be reuniting 
with people who are in normal time, so why won't we be able to just... fit in, 
and then live normal lives?"
    "Because their normal time is sixteen years earlier than ours. We have 
knowledge of sixteen years of events on our voyage which haven't happened in 
their universe. How can we just fit in?"
    "But we have next to no knowledge of what happened on Earth in that time," 
Nikki said. "On Earth, only eight years passed-as we were traveling out to 
ACA-and now those eight years should be rolled back up in our return. But we 
know nearly nothing even of those first eight years on Earth. It's as if they 
didn't happen for us either. We've had so little contact from Earth since we 
left."
    "I know," Aaron said. He wanted to say, even less than it would seem.
    "I-I'm sorry, Aaron. You know about the earlier messages too, then."
    "It's OK," Aaron said. She'd always been good at reading him.
    Nikki shook her head. "Naomi didn't trust you completely, either. She warned 
me about you. She said I should keep some kind of card up my sleeve, because I 
might need it on the voyage. She was a real player, that woman. So I fiddled 
around with those birthday greetings. I knew those algorithms, if I could 
perfect them, would give me some kind of edge. After that scene on the way out 
with Bo, when you pressured me into overriding him, I knew I'd need any edge 
over you I could get."
    Aaron nodded. "I understand. It's water under the bridge-of this hip or 
whatever. I'm sorry for what I contributed to it. But the bigger point you were 
making, about us having had little contact from Earth, is still a very big 
problem. Can we just come back and coexist in an earlier time when, true, we've 
had no real interactive connection with them in the interim, but we've 
nonetheless been living and experiencing the future out here anyway?"
    "You think we can't?" Nikki asked.
    "I don't know," Aaron said. "The universe has a way of finding a 
way-something's going to happen in the next few days. I guess the real question 
is, will we like it? Will we even know it when it happens?"


    Aaron stopped by Roger's room on his way over to Jack's.
    He was sitting there, expressionless, the way he'd looked just about , all 
of these past eight years.
    A heartrending, terrible waste.
    Yet Aaron knew Roger was aware of what was going on. Alicia said she talked 
to him once in a while. A lot of that had to be make-believe, but, still, it had 
a ring of truth to it. He wished Roger could have more time with Alicia. He 
sometimes thought that Alicia more than anyone else held the key to 
understanding what had gone wrong all those years ago inside Roger's head.
    "I think there's a good chance you'll be talking again if we get through the 
next few days, old buddy."
    No response from Roger.
    "In fact, I've got a feeling the reunion will be kinder to you than anyone 
else on board."
    For Roger, at least, there'd be a tradeoff. If he snapped back to the way 
he'd been sixteen years earlier, he'd lose all recollection of this trip, of 
people who truly loved him here, the knowledge that he had a son. And that would 
be awful.
    But he'd also regain his speech and communicative abilities, and lose 
whatever it was that had taken all of that away from him.
    For the rest who might snap back sixteen years-they would just lose sixteen 
years of life experience. Just a loss, with no such compensation.
    For the kids ... Aaron shuddered. He still couldn't see them surviving the 
reunion; they had no prior life of sixteen years earlier to lick into. Their 
only chance was maybe, somehow, on this ship-
    "Typo," Roger said. "Tyop."
    "I know," Aaron said. When the adults returned from their temporary 
disarrangement of being four light-years from the star around which they were 
born, each in one way or another would still be in a profound state of 
disinformation. Maybe Roger was talking about their exquisitely disarranged 
lives.
    Aaron long had thought that the most likely explanation of Roger's inability 
to communicate was that he'd somehow seen an infinitely recursive future that he 
and everyone on the ship were part of-their ship caught in a river that flowed 
both ways between the two stars eternally, a fate so enormously inexplicable 
that it had defeated forever Roger's capacity to talk about it, or anything 
else.
    Maybe that's why Alicia seemed to have the most luck with him. She never 
asked Roger to talk, she never requested any information from him, explicitly or 
implicitly. All she wanted was his love. And that he seemed quite able to give 
her.
    But if glimpsing some endless loop that he was a part of was the cause of 
Roger's aphasia of the soul, then returning to Earth wasn't in the cards for 
Roger. Or, if he did return, that should break the infinite loop, at least for 
him, and thereby invalidate the animus of his silence. So why, then, was he 
silent? Was his current silence somehow irrevocable evidence that he would never 
return to Earth?
    Aaron pondered: If I exercise my free will to insist that Roger did return, 
if I so chose, could my free will be that circumscribed? Would something prevent 
me from liberating Roger from this loop?
    Maybe so-their return from ACA had nothing to do with free will.
    He wished he could ask Roger. Ask him if he'd prefer to return to Earth and 
likely lose all knowledge of his son, or stay aboard with that knowledge but 
with no way to communicate. He wished he could ask that. But what would it 
accomplish? Roger couldn't answer. And Roger had no more free will in this than 
anyone.
    Aaron stood up. As he'd been telling everyone the past few days, whatever 
was going to happen would happen. There was no point exhausting himself any 
further in pursuit of an answer that was utterly unattainable today, but would 
be in their hands tomorrow without their even trying.
    Aaron was tired of generating ever more food for thought for this rapacious 
engine of paradox that raged inside himself. He was tired of feeding what could 
not be fed.
    He sometimes thought that his inability to stop this feeding frenzy in his 
head was his biggest paradox of all.
    Better stop thinking about that too now.
    "It'll all be over soon," he said.
    He put his hand on his loyal friend's shoulder. This friend who now felt 
like a son to him, but whose own son was older than Aaron's daughter by the same 
remarkable woman. The stars, our better halves, make for complicated families.


    Jack's room, and Jack, smelled of Kathy's fragrance.
    "I've got most of Aviva's prints packed away," Jack said. "They're really 
something."
    "Equally per customer?" Aaron asked.
    Jack nodded.
    By distributing the prints among the returning people, they had heightened 
the likelihood that at least some of the screens would somehow get through. Each 
screen was hard-moduled to display a complete set of the d-traits. And Aviva had 
put enough redundancy into these prints that as much as 90 percent of them could 
be lost without unreconstructable damage to the story of their voyage. Each 
d-trait series was like a holographic hypermedia colony: It could usually be 
totally reconstructed from any fragment of the hologram, any one member of the 
colony.
    "I'm still concerned that if those who return to Earth lose their memories, 
then no one will be around to point out the significance of the d-traits," Jack 
said.
    "I know," Aaron said, "but what more can we do? Surely the d-traits will 
attract some interest somewhere."
    "I guess Roger's our best chance." Jack rubbed his chin. "Maybe somehow in 
those crossed wires of his a memory will resurface after they reboot on Earth."
    "Hell of a situation we've gotten ourselves into, haven't we," Aaron said. 
"We either live without memories on Earth, or travel back to Alpha Centauri with 
plenty of memories but no real way of sharing hem with our species. Assuming, of 
course, that our analysis is right."
    "If our analysis is right, the kids have even less choice than that," Jack 
said. "They're lucky, though, to have parents like you and Kathy."
    "Well, you're in every way that really counts their father too," Aaron said.
    Jack smiled. "They're good kids. I'd miss them if for some reason I couldn't 
be with them."
    "The only way you won't be with them is if we all wink out of existence at 
the reunion, so there's no point in your worrying about it."
    Aaron was glad they were approaching that omega point, one way or another.
    No, he wasn't-for everything he cared about hinged on this ending just one, 
very specific way.







Twenty


    And now the years that recently had shrunk into days and then hours were 
down to minutes.
    Nikki was next to Aaron at the main viewscreen.
    Naomi and the small group that had seen them off were there on the screen, 
sixteen years earlier. Except it was happening now. Happening again, for Aaron 
and Nikki.
    Percival and Primakov were there too. A bit off to the side, sixteen years 
earlier.
    The greatest moment of their lives.
    Aaron saw the radiance of expectation on their faces, over varying deeper 
degrees of relief and resentment for not being on the mission. He had missed 
some of that, the first time, when he had last seen his team.
    Not surprising. He had seen the future in between.
    "Not a bad homecoming picture," Nikki said.
    "True, but don't forget we're looking at the departure aftermath, not a 
welcoming party," Aaron said. "That's the gang about fifty-five minutes after we 
left, sixteen years ago."
    "I know," Nikki said. "So you're sure you're not coming with us?"
    "Nothing for me back there," Aaron said. "Everything here for me in the 
stars. You won't see my children-my grown children-in that crowd. Naomi had 
invited them. But they hadn't approved. Even their birthday cards were faked. 
And how much longer will I live, anyway?
    Another ten, fifteen, twenty years? I'd rather spend that time in the 
stars-with my new family, my real family."
    "I understand," Nikki said. "I said good-bye to Hiro and Aviva and the kids 
in the garden. You're wise to keep them away from the actual exit-access 
point-no telling what kind of crazy physical fluctuations will be going on there 
at the instant of total reunion." She looked at him. "You're doing the right 
thing. All of you. I hope you feel the same about me-and Bo. And Roger."
    "We have to give Roger his chance on Earth," Aaron said. "We can't do any 
more for him here. You and Bo too. You're entitled to breathe fresh air and walk 
among people-just anonymous people- any time you please. As for the rest of us, 
well, the kids are our people now-Kathy's and Jack's and mine. And now that Hiro 
and Aviva are expecting a child, their lives are tied to the ship too. We can't 
risk the children in a space-time existence they were never a part of." Aaron 
didn't know for sure whether Hiro and Aviva would have stayed had Aviva not been 
pregnant. Maybe their decision to have a baby was in some way designed to fix 
their minds in favor of staying. Whatever their reasons, he was glad, both about 
their staying and the baby.
    Funny how pregnancy, which had seemed so outrageous at first with Kathy, now 
seemed appropriate, almost to be expected, with Aviva. It was as if the vacuum 
of interstellar space required filling by humans who found themselves in its 
precincts and recognized its need.
    "I'll miss you," Nikki said. "Hard to believe that I'm saying it, that I'm 
feeling it, but it's true. I'll miss you."
    No, you won't, Aaron thought. In less than an hour, you'll barely know me.
    "I just pray I'll have the memory to miss you, to miss all this," Nikki said 
and gestured around the view room.
    Aaron put his arm on her shoulder. She hugged him.
    "We'll try to come through for you, Aaron, for the human species," Nikki 
said, and he felt her tears on his cheek. Tears were flowing faster than water 
these past few hours. "All the fighting, all the tension, seems so trivial now, 
doesn't it? We'll somehow get through to them back here. It won't all have been 
a waste. We'll get our story out, somehow."
    "I know you will," Aaron said, and thought, Well, what's one more last 
little lie between us now? It couldn't do any harm. At least this one derived 
from the best of intentions. Well, maybe they all had, all along.
    "I've always admired your decency," Aaron said. "And we couldn't have made 
it this far without your brains." And that was no lie, not in the slightest.
    She hugged him again and pulled away. "Watch for my signal, after we dock 
and disembark," she said. "That way you'll know that my memory made it through 
Point Reunion."


    Two groups entered at opposite ends of a long corridor.
    Aaron rubbed his eyes and stared at them on the screen.
    One group, numbering seven, saw only an empty corridor ahead, leading to a 
portal to the ship that would take them to Alpha Centauri. They walked with the 
eyes of humanity on their backs, overhead, and on their faces-humanity's witness 
to the boarding of the first human trip to the stars. And Aaron's eyes were upon 
them too. Twice now. One from where he'd seen them depart sixteen years earlier. 
One from the view room of the Light Through, just back from that trip to the 
stars.
    The other group numbered three, and they could clearly see the group of 
seven-three of whom were their younger selves-approaching in the corridor. Or, 
at least two of them could see the approaching seven. For no one other than 
Roger McLaren in his current condition could know what, if anything, he was 
seeing.
    It was clear to everyone on the Light Through that, on the starship at 
least, all memories were intact and all minds were functioning as they had been. 
That was good news. But it said nothing about what would happen to the people 
who had left the ship, how long the ship's stasis field would continue, how long 
before the galactic current began carrying them back out to Alpha Centauri, if 
that's what it did.
    Jack and I-our earlier selves-will be walking through the public portal in 
about twenty minutes, Aaron thought. Naomi will be waving us away for what she 
thought was the first time, but what we on the ship will know was the second. Or 
maybe somehow there would be two ships leaving, two Light Through's at the same 
time, one which was new, and one which was sixteen years old and had already 
traveled out o ACA and back. Two ships, slightly different crews, the second 
superimposed on the first, or maybe in some kind of tandem, parallel 
universes...
    "Getting to the point of no return," Nikki said, sotto voce, into the tiny 
microphone she had pasted under her chin. Bo and even Roger- even Roger, just in 
case he suddenly began talking and expressed a desire not to leave the ship-had 
one too. "I guess it's go now or forever hold our whatevers," Nikki said.
    Nikki looked just like what her younger self looked like, approaching in the 
corridor. Same with Bo and Roger. Same clothes, same hairstyles, nearly exactly 
the same faces-the quick reconstructive DNA facials Kathy had given them had 
worked wonders. All too common back on Earth, if Aaron recalled correctly. They 
were intended now to help the three returnees blend in as seamlessly as possible 
with the past they were about to reenter.
    Aaron looked back at the group of seven. God, there was Sarah.
    She was walking to her death. He should run out, scream out, warn her- He 
couldn't do that. Too much else depended on everything happening just as it had 
the first time.
    "Go," Aaron said to Nikki and Bo and Roger. "And Godspeed."
    But Nikki stopped.
    The approaching group of seven walked blithely forward, still a good two 
city blocks away from the group of three.
    "Won't the Light Through look like it has a smaller crew?" Nikki asked.
    "You mean our current ship? Well, with Aviva's baby, our ship could scan as 
eight lives as it departs-I don't know how precise the scan is at that distance 
for the newly conceived. That is one less than our original nine. But I'm not 
even sure our current ship will be the one that is scanned and not the earlier 
version, so-"
    "Come on." Bo put his arm around Nikki. "Aaron has the right of this. We 
can't figure all of it out now. Who knows, maybe our return will have an effect 
yet farther back in time, and change everyone's understanding of the voyage in 
the first place, so they think it's just a crew of eight. We have no way of 
knowing that now. We have no time to debate it-but we'll find out for sure in a 
few minutes."
    Bo raised his clenched fist in the old gesture of solidarity, of brothers in 
arms, that he knew Aaron could see. Brothers in arms against he universe. Aaron 
and Bo. Did Bo know now that he'd never been in charge, not even for a moment? 
Aaron got no satisfaction from that. Even now, Bo was likely still not 
completely clear about what was going on-that Nikki and he would likely know 
nothing for sure after the next few minutes, except what they knew sixteen years 
earlier, before their voyage began. They'd lose sixteen years of their lives-be 
in the same place they were sixteen years before-except they'd be sixteen years 
older. Maybe Bo did understand but didn't care. Either way, Bo and Nikki would 
have no perspective, no fulfilling closure, on any of this.
    Aaron took no satisfaction in that either. In fact, it made him sick to 
think about it.
    The group of three-Nikki and Bo and Roger-walked on.
    Aaron had lived with these three like a family for sixteen years. A 
dysfunctional one most of the time, but a family. And Roger meant much more to 
him than that.
    What would they feel as they walked by their earlier selves and therein 
entered the time-space of sixteen years before? What would an instant blanking 
of sixteen years of memories and life feel like? What would the rest of the 
world see? What would happen to it?
    "We've got the prints here," Bo whispered, just a handshake away now from 
his earlier self. "Even if our memories get eaten up, this will somehow jog our 
recollections. We'll mount a new expedition, we'll come meet you in the stars. 
Remember that! Always remember! Don't despair!"
    And Aaron knew that was the last thing he'd ever hear from Bo.
    The three were now past their earlier selves.
    Physically, everything seemed as it was-no sudden explosions or implosions 
or whatever the hell might have happened in time-space bangs and singularities. 
Just sameness. A quiet, apparently unexceptional continuity. Good at least for 
that. Everyone was still alive.
    Aaron turned and looked around the view room. Kathy and Jack and Hiro were 
glued to the screens, straining to see even the slightest signal, the smallest 
gesture that could be taken to mean Bo and Nikki's memories had survived intact.
    Aaron looked too.
    He looked at Roger, walking farther and farther away from their ship. Roger 
had already said good-bye to him, to everyone, years before, really. In that 
message he'd left them on N'urth. Jack had shaken his hand an hour ago, then 
broken down and cried. First time Aaron had ever seen that.
    Let Roger find some peace on Earth. He's paid his dues in heaven and hell.
    And Roger walked on, mute as always, as the Vestibule corridor on the far 
end began closing in around him and Bo and Nikki.
    Kathy squeezed Aaron's hand and said, "He seems no different there than 
here."
    Hiro punched up extreme close-ups of each of the three from five different 
angles-a last chance to see any sign of remembrance.
    Aaron focused on Nikki's face, on her posture, the way her arms moved, the 
way her legs walked step by step by step.... He looked with every ounce of his 
eyesight, every last drop of optical neural energy he could muster. Come on, 
Nikki. Give us a sign-some small movement out of the ordinary, some tiny 
gesture, some facial expression, so we'll know that the past sixteen years 
haven't gone from you entirely....
    He saw nothing.
    No signal, no sign. Nothing.
    He stopped looking at her face. He couldn't bear seeing such total absence 
in her face.
    "Nada," Jack said quietly. "She's sixteen years back in the past. Bo's 
sixteen years in the past. So's Roger, just like everyone else there. We don't 
exist here for them."
    "At least they're alive," Kathy voiced what Aaron had been thinking. "How 
will the rest of the world react to them, seeing three of the original crew walk 
back?"
    "I don't know," Aaron said. "All we know is that the first time out, there 
was no report of three not going on board, because of course the first time that 
didn't happen. Maybe we'll find out in a few minutes."
    "At least they were walking and breathing," Kathy said in reassurance.
    Aaron nodded. "But not talking.... Where are the seven-you and Roger and 
Sarah and Nikki and Bo and Aviva and Hiro-who were approaching our ship?" he 
asked hoarsely.
    "Already on board, sixteen years ago, in the first version of the Light 
Through," Jack said, not sounding very certain.
    "So where are we?" Kathy asked. "I mean us, here, in this room, right now?"
    "I don't know," Aaron said. "Hovering right over the original, shimmering 
within and outside and around it, in one sense-but separate from it, parallel-"
    The com chime sounded. Aviva's face appeared on the screen. She looked 
disoriented. Groggy.
    "What's the matter?" Hiro and Aaron said at the same time.
    "Where are the kids?" Kathy asked.
    Aviva looked confused. "I don't know."


    "It's OK," Aaron said. "We've been looking at nothing but who's been leaving 
the ship. We'd have seen Noah and Alicia if they tried to leave. They're still 
on board. They have to be." He paced around and looked again at the small room 
on the screen, as if the children were somehow still there.
    "Noah said he wanted me to look at some new virtel he'd produced," Aviva 
said, still rubbing her eyes. She had joined the others in the view room. "I 
remember looking at it, the swirling colors, and... I don't know, I guess I fell 
asleep-I don't know how that happened- and they were gone. I'm sorry," she said 
and started crying.
    "It's all right," Aaron said. "They couldn't have gone anywhere. And this 
wasn't your fault-something must have put you to sleep. Maybe the impact of 
approaching Point Reunion on someone in your condition ... We should have 
thought of that."
    "No, something more," Hiro grunted, turning away from a digital programmic 
printout of the virtel Aviva had been watching. "This is some kind of 
hypnotherapy virtel, designed to coax the brain waves into sleep. See those 
gamma-wave algorithms over there?"
    Kathy nodded, still too frantic for speech.
    "OK, let's do a full ship scan for the children," Aaron said.
    Hiro quickly jabbed some commands into the console.
    "Won't tell us much," Jack said, before the scan indeed turned up empty. 
"Since we've been in stasis, most of the ship's instruments have been frozen."
    Kathy made a strangled sound.
    "It's all right," Aaron said again. "There's no way they could've left 
without our seeing it."
    "We don't know that," she finally sobbed. "They could've vanished the 
instant they tried to leave. We have no idea how this reunion shift actually 
works-for all we know, their very intention to leave could've provoked some sort 
of time-cleansing response. Maybe they just disappeared, whatever they were 
thinking." She could barely talk. "We still don't really know how all that QM 
stuff worked. We don't know anything!" Now she was screaming.
    "OK," Aaron said, trying to calm her, as well as himself. "We'll search the 
ship, hands on, room by room, closet by bathroom. We'll find them. I promise 
you. Aviva-do you feel well enough to stay here and let us know if you see 
anything more on the screen?"
    She nodded. "I'm sorry ...," she said again to Kathy.
    Kathy put her arms around her, crying. "It wasn't your fault. Noah's very 
headstrong, just like everyone else on this damn ship."
    "I don't know how much longer the ship will stay in stasis," Jack said.
    Aaron glared at him. "So? You've got any better ideas?"
    Jack just shook his head.
    He and Hiro searched separately. Aaron searched with Kathy-he didn't want to 
leave her on her own.


    They found Alicia, huddled and whimpering in Hiro's garden, a few minutes 
later.
    "Honey!" Kathy ran when she saw her and scooped her up.
    "Mommy, Mommy!" Alicia said through heaves and tears. "I tried to stop him-I 
told him he could die!-but he wouldn't listen."
    Aaron stroked her head. "It's OK, sweetheart. Noah told you he was leaving?"
    She shook her head yes.
    "Did he say how?"
    Alicia shook her head no, bit her lip, and resumed crying.
    "It's OK," Aaron repeated. But damnit-they hadn't seen him leave. How could 
he have gotten around the cameras? Around lenses that never blink? The boy was 
good with technical stuff on the ship, but not that good-not good enough to 
reprogram the cameras to show  false image, an image that disguised his 
departure, without leaving a trace of the reprogramming in the system....
    Not good enough for that-at least, Aaron hoped not. This whole trip had been 
laced with false programming. He called Hiro, Jack, and Aviva, and told them 
about finding Alicia.
    "Hiro, are any of the diagnostic systems working yet?" Aaron asked.
    "Yes, the main diagnostic system was always working. It runs on a 
self-sustaining power source that can't go off."
    "Good." Aaron asked Hiro to run a quick diagnostic on the camera system.
    That took about ninety seconds. "No sign of reprogramming," Hiro said.
    Aaron sighed with relief. He'd been right-Noah wasn't that good. Then he 
thought: Could Noah have been not only that good, but better, at programming, so 
that he not only reprogrammed the cameras to disguise his leaving but also to 
disguise the reprogramming?
    No, even Nikki hadn't been able to do that.
    But where, then, was Noah?
    He had to be somewhere on the ship.
    "Aviva," Aaron asked on the com, "anything new?"
    "No-no sign of Noah. Any sight of him on your end?"
    "No."
    Same lack of news from Hiro and Jack.
    They continued searching.
    Aviva called again, about ten minutes later, just as Kathy and Aaron and 
Alicia completed a futile search of engineering. "Come right away," Aviva said, 
in a tone that sliced Aaron's insides to shreds.
    "Noah?" Aaron asked.
    Kathy held on to Alicia and looked as if she were dying.
    "Jack," Aviva replied.


    "I'm going to look for him-on the outside," Jack said, a footstep and a 
heartbeat away from the center of the public corridor to the past- the one with 
Naomi and Percival and the handful of others-a corridor that would blank out 
sixteen years of life.
    "Why?" Aaron said. "There's nothing you can do there. Even if
    Noah went through the exit, and he's OK, you likely won't know what he looks 
like once you go through."
    Aaron could see his younger self, sixteen years earlier, hugging Percival. 
He looked away, and concentrated on Jack, the older Jack, turned now toward his 
younger self, who looked like he was looking right at the older Jack, right damn 
at him....
    "And we don't know for sure that Noah went through," Kathy was saying, 
expressing what even Aaron was beginning to feel was more a desperate hope than 
a likelihood at this point. They'd searched the ship and turned up nothing.
    "Right," Jack said. "We don't know any damn thing for sure here. Never did. 
But you're on the ship in case Noah is there, and I'll be here for him in case 
he made it through. That way we've got all the bases covered for the boy."
    That same damn stubbornness the man had shown all his life, even as a kid in 
the goddamn lot Aaron had moved into. "But you won't remember-"
    "Bullshit," Jack said. "Who knows that for sure? I've got connections with 
ancient people, remember? Who knows what I'll be able to recall or not? Wise Oak 
remembered lots of things no one else could. And I carry within me the wisdom of 
many generations--I've always known that. One little cosmic anomaly's not gonna 
stop me."
    "Jack, listen to me," Kathy pleaded. "Come back with us."
    "No," Jack said. "You listen to me. I love you-all of you, Even you, 
Professor, even though you always were a chronocentric, logocentric, every other 
damn centric for whatever-the-hell-it-is bastard who loves philosophy too much 
for his own damn good. I'm going to go after Noah-and if he isn't here, well, 
maybe I'll figure out a way to give Roger a little help explaining all of 
Aviva's beautiful pictures."
    "Please, Jack," Kathy began again, "you've got a life to live with us."
    "What? A long life like Russell and Shaw? I never believed in that anyway. I 
only went through the gene therapy to satisfy Aaron. Whatever genes I have in 
me, they didn't make me a philosopher or a dramatist."
    "I love what your genes made you; I always will," Kathy said, hugging Alicia 
and Aaron close to her.
    Aaron tried to say something, but his voice broke. He said nothing ore. No 
point. He knew it was too late. He knew his friend. He knew them both-the 
younger Jack and the older Jack, who now crossed each other in the middle of the 
corridor.
    The older Jack walked on, gave no sign, his face no different from what it 
had been just a second before.
    "You look like you've just seen a ghost, Jack," Aaron's younger self said to 
the younger Jack, as they walked together down the corridor toward the Light 
Through, sixteen years earlier.
    But Aaron's older self barely heard that-his eyes and and his brain were 
burning with too many tears about too many things.


    "The ship's beginning to pull back-to pull out," Hiro said. "I can feel it, 
and the ship's peripheral instruments are beginning to come back on-line."
    The viewscreen showed Naomi and the group waving good-bye, one more time, 
exactly as they had sixteen years before. Aaron was goddamn sick of this replay.
    Kathy, shaking, clutching Alicia, gave Aaron a look that said she'd go 
through the door too if it weren't for Alicia. Aaron felt the same.
    "Anything we should do now?" Hiro prompted.
    Aaron shook his head. How could Noah be out there?
    Aaron kept returning to the same thing: They would have seen him on the 
screen.
    "All crew-supported systems are now on automatic," Aviva reported from the 
other side of the room. "The algorithm relays we put in over the past few weeks 
have all kicked in now, and they're working."
    "Good," Aaron mumbled. He couldn't take his mind off Noah.
    He felt Hiro's hand on his shoulder. "We're alive, Aaron. That's what you've 
got to think of now. Alicia's here, and we've got to take care of her. Whatever 
it is that happened out there, they survived and we survived-we both made it 
through. Let's keep searching here for Noah."
    Aaron nodded.
    "Should we try sending a message to Naomi now?" Aviva asked. "All the com 
systems seem back on-line."
    "Yeah," Aaron replied, still thinking mostly about Noah. They had created 
several messages that would briefly explain what had happened-that they survived 
the rendezvous and were on their way back out into space, as they now apparently 
were. They could eventually tell their whole story to Naomi and Earth this way, 
if communication could be established. They could also ask Naomi to look for 
Noah.
    "It's not working," Aviva said. "It looks from here like the message is 
reaching her com port, but it's not registering."
    Aaron nodded again.
    "We must be out of synch with her in some way," Hiro said. "She and the 
original Light Through with its crew are on one plane, we are on another. Even 
though we're in the same time..."
    "Should I try again?" Aviva asked.
    "Yeah," Aaron answered.
    They got the same signal: transmission unreceived.
    "Let's keep looking for Noah," Aaron said.
    They searched the rest of the day and into the night, keeping one eye on the 
viewscreen for any sign of Noah back on Mars Vestibule. They searched the same 
places, over and over again, like squirrels scratching the ground for acorns 
they had buried. They found no sign of Noah. Just like the acorns buried under 
the concrete poured over Jack's lot in the Bronx so many years ago...
    The ship began picking up speed near the asteroid belt. Just like the first 
time. But it felt a little faster. Maybe like the way driving to a place the 
second time always seemed to take less time than the first.
    The sun was beginning to recede again.
    The fuel had diminished slightly, just as it should have for time-forward 
travel in space.
    "Let's try to get some sleep," Aaron said to Kathy. Alicia was in bed, 
already sleeping, between them.
    "OK," Kathy said.
    Maybe Hiro and Aviva could see this accursed ship through this next trip.
    Aaron wasn't sure he had the soul to do it anymore.


    A soft, cool hand on his forehead woke him. He opened his eyes. Kathy came 
into focus. "I had an idea," she said. "There's one more place where he might 
be-Alicia just told me about something. I don't want to go there myself. Please 
come?"
    "Sure." Aaron pulled on his pants and a soiled shirt. "Where?"
    The lights on the ship indicated early morning. Alicia led Kathy by the 
hand. She told them about the time, years earlier, when she had just been a 
little girl, and Noah had tried to steal a shuttle ship. She'd woken Kathy up to 
tell her that a few minutes earlier. That's what had given Kathy the idea.
    They walked their way slowly down the hall, three blind mice, to the shuttle 
bay.
    Of course, the shuttle. The one place they hadn't thought to look inside of. 
Aaron had confirmed with his own eyes that the small craft was still ensconced 
in its moorings. It hadn't gone anywhere, with or without Noah. But could the 
boy have gone inside, rigged the programming to conceal his presence? To what 
end?
    Aaron jumped up to the shuttle door and finger-danced the open-sesame jig on 
the keypad.
    The door stayed shut.
    Aaron tried again.
    Same result.
    He pounded his fist on the keypad in frustration.
    A good way to break it.
    "What's going on?" Kathy asked from below.
    "The door won't open," Aaron said.
    "What's that mean?"
    "It might mean the door is stuck, it might mean Noah locked himself in with 
manual override.... Noah," Aaron said as sternly as he could, "open this door. 
Now!" He pounded again on the pad.
    No response.
    "Is he there?" Kathy asked.
    "Is he there?" Kathy asked again.
    "I don't know," Aaron finally said.
    That's all he'd been telling people he loved, people he cared about, for 
sixteen years.
    He pounded on the pad again, on the door, again and again. He pounded. His 
wrist felt on the verge of shattering. "Noah, open up!"
    Eventually, he slid off the platform back to the floor. Kathy and Alicia 
were crying. When the hell would he ever learn his lesson- hen would he learn 
what he was so fond of telling everyone else: To want something, to desire it so 
much that your very soul was tearing, that still wasn't enough to make it so.
    When would he learn?
    When he was a hundred?
    He put his arm, a limp, beaten dishrag, around Kathy and Alicia and they 
walked toward the door.
    Alicia turned around, then broke away.
    "Mommy, Daddy," she shouted. "Look!"
    And Aaron turned around. The shuttle door was open.
    And Noah stood inside, eyes red and lips trembling.
    Aaron ran with Kathy and pulled Noah down from the shuttle and into his 
arms. "It's OK, son, I know why you did this, we're not mad, we love you," Aaron 
said over and over again.
    "I wanted to see where you came from-where I came from," Noah said. "I 
thought if I went there with the shuttle, away from this ship, I could avoid the 
time flip, and then come back here with you and Jack and Mom."
    "It's OK," Kathy said. "We love you."
    Aaron felt a stab in his heart about Jack. Nothing could be complete 
joy-even holding Noah like this. But it would do. They could tell Noah about 
Jack later. Tell Noah that Uncle Jack had fulfilled Wise Oak's vision by 
returning. How Jack had perhaps really become Wise Oak by returning...
    "But the shuttle wouldn't move," Noah was saying. "It was stuck in the 
stasis. And then when our ship started moving away again, I didn't know what to 
do."
    Stasis had prevented Noah from moving the shuttle. Ten years earlier this 
boy might have moved a starship and remade a planet.
    "It's OK," Kathy and Aaron said.
    They walked to the view room. Hiro and Aviva joined them. They were 
jubilant.
    The shuttle had been stuck in stasis-thank the cosmos or the universe or 
whatever it was that saw to such things for that.
    But their ship, the Light Through, was moving. Again.
    Ahead lay Jupiter and the outer planets and the sparkling Oort and who knew 
what else back on Alpha Centauri this time around.











Epilogue


    The chime jolted Naomi Senzer out of her memo.
    "Damn you, I thought I told you no interruptions unless it was urgent."
    "Well, does extremely peculiar to the point of inexplicability touch any 
part of the urgent fringe?"
    "All right," she said. "What is it, then?"


    "Good to see you, Naomi." A man entered and extended a flaccid hand.
    "Jack." Naomi stood up, genuinely surprised. "I thought someone was using 
your name when my assistant said you wanted to see me."
    "No, it's me," Jack said. "One of the few things I'm sure of these days."
    "You were supposed to be on the ship with Aaron-I saw the both of you off. 
What the hell did you do, sneak off at the last minute?" The readings indeed had 
reported numbers of people on board that didn't add up. The readings had 
sometimes reported two ships under way, not one. And a phantom message or two. 
Chalk it up to the ship's unprecedented speed at that distance-it was probably 
throwing off the Hubble's tracking. She'd messaged Aaron about it several times, 
but so far had received no reply.
    "I don't know," Jack said.
    "What do you mean? Are you OK?" He looked awful-she'd never really noticed 
before the deep, intensely grooved lines in his face. They reminded her of the 
cracks she'd seen on the surface plates of Mercury.
    She didn't know what she could possibly expect to find out from him. Getting 
a straight answer from him right here in her office was less likely than from 
Aaron on his way to the stars.
    She couldn't believe, even now, that she'd let herself be persuaded into 
letting this expedition proceed.
    "I don't know," Jack said again. "I mean, I guess I sneaked off. Yeah. But 
that's not really why I came to see you."
    "Well, don't be shy. You maybe had another vision you wanted to share?"
    "In a way, yes. It's not as clear as a vision. It's more a-a feeling- but 
one that I'm more and more sure of as the days go by. I think this may not be 
the first time our ship went to Alpha Centauri."
    "Look." Naomi pointed to her desk screen, the universal gesture of 
executives too busy to talk. "I really don't have time for this now. You had 
your chance. You left the ship. Now I think you'd do best to just forget about 
this whole project-you already did your damage in talking Aaron and me into 
letting it happen. I'm sorry I took you seriously in the first place." She swore 
to God, she'd put this nutcase in a hospital right now if she wasn't concerned 
that that would call attention to her own lack of sanity in this project. She'd 
been having a full-time job as it was keeping reporters from the fact that half 
the science for this half-C trip came from some maharishi on the Hudson.
    Jack put up a placating hand. "I'm sorry-I know you don't like me-but I 
wouldn't have come to you if I wasn't desperate. I'm telling you that I think 
Aaron and the ship may be stuck in some sort of, I don't know, merry-go-round. 
And I was on it. And unless we do something, it'll keep traveling back and 
forth, over and over again."
    "Unless I do something like what?"
    "I don't know."
    "Over and over again," Naomi said. "You mean like your Iroquois river?"
    "Yeah, sort of," Jack said. "I guess so."
    "And you feel like you've been there-in this river-already?"
    "Yeah," Jack said.
    "So you've been to the star and back, and maybe you're really Wise Oak?" 
Naomi prodded.
    "Yes-no. I mean, no, I don't really think I'm Wise Oak," Jack said.
    "You don't really think you're Wise Oak. Good. Progress. Now, is there 
anyone else around who shares your, ah, feelings about this trip?" And please 
don't parade a bunch of butt-naked Indians in here to see me, she thought. I 
take my pleasures elsewhere.
    "Yes, I think so," Jack said. "But I can't remember who they are...."
    "Ah-ha. OK. Anything else?"
    "Well, I had a dream that there may be some pictures around that could prove 
this. I saw the same pictures in a vision-"
    "But don't tell me," Naomi interrupted, "you don't actually have any of 
those in your possession either, right?"
    "No."
    This man was too pathetic to even put in a hospital. It looked to Naomi like 
Jack Lumet, never completely together in the first place, had suffered some sort 
of further mental breakdown when he'd hightailed it off the ship. Or maybe 
that's why he left the ship. Jesus H., the pathology in this world!
    "All right, Jack. Here's my card with a more direct number if you think of 
anything more." She had to keep reminding herself that, as distasteful as she 
found this, it was far better than him babbling his visions to the media.
    "Please, I know I'm not making much sense," Jack said. "I haven't been 
myself the past few weeks. I'm confused. I know that. But I really think I'm in 
touch with something here that-"
    "Right, just call the number on the card."
    She thought she saw a shadow of anger in his eyes. Just for a second he 
looked like the Jack she had said good-bye to just last month by the ship. He 
started to say something-something that sounded like a threat if she didn't take 
him seriously-but then he gained shaky control of himself and left with a 
mumbled thank-you.
    The man was dangerous.
    Something would have to be done.
    Just not now.


    

    "Roger, if that bugjob ever drops by here again unannounced and you foist 
him on me, I'll dump both you and that urgent tongue of yours right back behind 
a desk on the Potomac. Got that?" She was glad that Roger had had second 
thoughts at the last minute about going. Smart move for him-he had a successful 
life ahead here-and smart move for her. She could use him here on her team, 
where the real action was.
    Of course, with Nikki Dee off the ship as well, that left her only one other 
person on board who could keep an eye on Aaron. Her most secret of secret 
resources. Redundancy. Thank God for that. Aaron had been right that you 
couldn't have too much of it on a project like this. It was really the only 
defense against the unexpected.
    "Understood, Madam," McLaren answered smartly. "And meanwhile, the 
president's office called to remind you about the press conference next Monday 
in New York."
    She sighed. She was getting to like semipermanent residence in Mars Vest. 
The low-g tea was great. Aaron was right about that too. And the view...
    "All right, book me a seat on tomorrow's shuttle. Call Nikki Dee at research 
and tell her I'll want her to come with me."
    Back to Earth, back up here, back to Earth-with an election coming up, and 
the second fully digital one in the U.S. at that, the Demo Party was jerking her 
and her space expertise around like a goddamn yo-yo.
    Politics.
    Now there was a creek that really did flow both ways.


    McLaren placed the calls, all the while looking at a digital portrait of 
what seemed to be a featureless dark ship, reminiscent in a way of the Light 
Through to Alpha Centauri he had almost embarked on....
    Naomi had been honest with Nikki and him and the others at that special 
private briefing before the mission-she'd told them how uncertain the chances 
were for the starship's safe return-and she'd been genuinely glad when in the 
very last minutes before the launch the two had decided not to go. He gave her 
credit for that-not like Alexei Primakov, who'd gone apoplectic when Bo Ivanoff 
had done the same.
    He couldn't recall an actual conversation with Ivanoff about leaving the 
ship-nor, for that matter, with Nikki. But he was unclear about a lot of things 
having to do with that almost-trip. He recalled walking down the long corridor 
with the six others toward the ship. He'd had his doubts about going, sure, just 
like everyone, except maybe Aaron and Jack. But he'd come to terms with himself 
about the trip and the risk. At least he thought he had. Then he found himself 
trudging along with Nikki and Bo away from the ship. What were they doing 
walking the wrong way, walking away? None of them could say exactly why. It was 
as if the three had somehow suddenly made a decision not to go, and had suffered 
some brief crisis of pain so intense about the decision that their minds had 
mercifully fogged it over.
    At least, that's how it seemed to Roger and, from his many talks with Nikki 
and Bo, to them as well. The three now shared some sort of deep, unarticulated 
bond. Part of it was guilt about not going. How would the ship function without 
them? Extraordinary redundancy had been built into the crew's abilities, he knew 
that, but still... He could see Aaron's face at night, he could see Kathy 
Lotari's face. He liked those faces. He felt guilty.
    But guilt wasn't the only thing. There was something else, something even 
deeper that he could not identify.
    He thought about Jack. When had he left the ship? Jack had been so sure of 
himself, so profoundly at peace with himself about the voyage. Why would he 
leave?
    Who the hell else had left the ship?
    Roger wondered if the ship were maybe on some kind of automatic pilot-a 
robot ship after all-with no one on board. That's what Naomi had really wanted 
all along.
    Maybe the crew was just pretense ... but pretense for who?
    Jack's just showing up here like this must have had something to do with 
what was really going on. Where had he been these past few weeks? Mars Vest had 
many off-line nooks and crannies, places with delights that no computer scan 
could locate. But Jack hadn't looked like he'd been having too good a time.
    They'd exchanged contact info before Roger had let Jack in to see Naomi. 
Roger made a note to definitely look Jack up....
    The truth was, a very strong part of Roger still felt like going. It wasn't 
like him to change his mind about something that important after months of 
grueling preparation. Where had that last-minute impulse come from?
    Roger focused again on the digital portrait of the featureless ship. He 
shuddered.
    Strange, he had no idea where that picture had come from either.
    It had turned up in his belongings a few days after the ship had 
left-probably slipped into one of his vest pockets years earlier by one of his 
friends in the rain forests, a memento he either couldn't recall or never had 
seen in the first place.
    He stroked the keys. The image fed off some kind of program, probably the 
work of one of the high-tech witch doctors along the Amazon. He'd never seen 
anything quite like it before.
    So far the program had produced two images.
    One was of a small boy. Oddly compelling, beautiful, really, with eyes that 
somehow looked just like Roger's maternal grandfather's. He wondered how long 
ago the image had been programmed-how old the boy was now. It reminded him of a 
tintype he had picked up at a flea market in London when he was a kid, of a 
woman who looked at him across 125 years with longing eyes. Had she any idea, 
when she'd posed for that picture, that someday he would be drinking it in on 
the other side of time? He'd felt that somehow, somewhere, that woman was still 
alive.
    He felt the same way about the boy in the digital portrait. More so, like 
the boy was somehow connected to him....
    And then the portrait of the cypher ship. Just a ship, with no clear form. 
It frightened him in some dank, empty way, like a tin can rattling around in 
some corner of his history that he couldn't put his finger on.
    But its appeal, like eyes behind sunglasses, was irresistible....